Overview

Purpose

RacksDB is an open source solution to modelize your datacenters infrastructures. It provides a simple database schema to store information about the equipments in your datacenters, with tools and library to request this database. This database can be used as reference source for many purposes in IT management.

Inventory: Get permanent reference list of equipments charactistics and enable conformity testing.
Automation: Adopt Infrastructure-as-Code by coupling generic configuration management logic with infrastructures model.
Continuous deployment: Define advanced deployment rules based on nodes characteristics declared in RacksDB.
Monitoring: Synchronize monitoring services with equipments database and define dynamic dashboard.
Documentation: Get updated architecture diagrams and define generic adaptative procedures.

Generally speaking, RacksDB is a specialized CMDB^[1] dedicated to DCIM^[2].

Compared to others products, RacksDB can be considered lightweight alternative to more advanced tools such as NetBox and RackTables. Discover the main characteristics that makes it unique among other solutions.

Characteristics

The main characteristics of RacksDB are the following:

YAML based. The data are stored in plain files using human-readable YAML format, easily managed with Git.
Simple and pragmatic. The database schema is intuitive and practical, infrastructures can be described in few minutes.
Tag-based. Easy filtering of data and equipments based on associated tags.
Decentralized architecture. RacksDB can be deployed without central server, just by replicating few plain YAML files.
Extensibility. In addition to RacksDB simple format, custom schema extensions can be defined to store specific data.

Interfaces

Once the database is defined, data can be searched and extracted using the racksdb CLI.

For full integration with your software, a Python library and a REST API can also be used to stay continuously synchronized with database content.

Diagrams

RacksDB can be used to generate diagrams of your datacenter rooms and the racks with all their equipments. The diagrams can be customized with many drawing parameters.