Obsidian for system documentation in IT

Knowledge management
1

Hello all,
I am very experienced in IT but very new in Obsidian. It looks beautiful and seems to be joy to work with. I have the following use-case.

I want to document and manage my quite complex home IT environment.
I have a physical server with proxmox and a bunch of containers for file and media servers, WLAN access point, Switch, Hardware Firewall, a printer and some servers (Mail, Nextcloud, Paperless) hosted at Hetzner. And of course PCs, Handies, Tablets and the like.

A part of this is already managed with ansible and so I have infrastructure as code, ad least in parts. But ansible READMEs for the roles an playbooks are not the place for the big picture.

I see Obsidian as an inventory for all the ā€œthingsā€ in my IT and their relationships plus a good basis for a lightweight tracking system for changes. My idea is :

  • Build some templates with properties for the items in the inventory.
  • Build dataviews and use Breadcrumbs to document the relationships between them and make them understandable.
  • Write Requirements in prose with some tasks mixed in and link them to the inventory items.
  • Link, link, link.

This is quite another thing as a Zettelkasten, the structure of the information is on the low level quite clear and easy to see. But of course ā€˜Notesā€™ in the classical sense have their place too.

I have high hopes to get a handle on this thorny problem, because I can now connect structured data, drawings and text in aconsistent and reliable manner.

Because I am so new to Obsidian i would be very grateful for any hints how to do this in Obsidian.

Thanks and all the best

Norbert

1 Like
2

Hi Norbert,

Are you looking for a System Engineer Wiki to store all your IT Knowledge Articles?

A place to draw out your HomeLab?

Or a combination of both?

Do you like the idea of storing information in folders or prefer tagging and linking information?

Have you experimented with any free Obsidian Vaults or other PKM apps such as Notion?

What do you currently use to document your IT knowledge or do you just use online docs from Microsoft, Google, etc

Personally my journey started with August Bradleys Notion Life OS which allowed me to build my own System Engineer Wiki. Before that I used OneNote for all my KBs and notes.

I found Notion to be a good IT System Engineer Wiki lookup system out of box relative database styled lookup but Notion wasnt offline or private so I migrated to Obsidian and havent looked backā€¦much. Some notes are still in Notion lol