Hello Habr! Have you ever experienced difficulties with the documentation of corporate Voice and Unified Communications infrastructures?
- What is this number? Where does it come from?
- Is this SIP trunk still relevant?
- Which of these Excel files do I need the information in?
- Do we have a free city number for a new service?
- Phone_numbers_new_072019 (3) .xlsx ?!
Sounds painfully familiar? There is an option that can help with this.
All interested are welcome under the cut!
TLDR: Using the Source of Truth paradigm (and NetBox as its implementation) in Voice and Unified Communications can be beneficial and promising. I also developed and published a new plugin for NetBox for managing phone numbers and much more.
How and what companies document
Since 2011, when I started my career in corporate IT, I have seen many options for organizing documentation. I have worked with distributed Voice and UC infrastructures with thousands of users, failover clusters, hundreds of voice devices and communication channels in total. However, regardless of region and size, all of these infrastructures had something in common: all the documentation for Voice and UC consisted of Microsoft Office and PDF files of varying degrees of order.
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NetBox :
CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) (Phone Numbers) - NetBox REST API.
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The plugin source code and instructions for installing and activating it inside NetBox are available on my GitHub page .
I plan to add additional abstractions and relationships to the plugin in the future. The difficulty of choosing abstractions suitable for describing arbitrary infrastructures, perhaps, deserves a separate article. Let me know if such material would be of interest to you.
Anyway, thanks for reading to the end. Feedback and alternative points of view would be welcome.