Monday, October 26, 2020

Good resources/advice for internal process documentation? (Cisco Shop)

Heys guys,

So I'm a network admin for the government, and somehow my curiosity got me to be one of the two main go-to guys. Previous management has been terrible with training since were always slammed with people moving around in teams alot. We keep having people go to our call center, exec team, security team, etc for 6 months to a year before coming back. Most people don't stick around for more than a few years because while the initial opportunities and benefits we get are amazing, you will quickly hit a wall of what you can do. Because of this we constantly have a knowledge lost. We also have a lot of newer guys who can only do basic patching and port configuration troubleshooting.

Were a big budget environment with over 1k Cisco switches mostly doing layer 2, and alot of tools available to us. Because of reporting we do have up to date topologies and recorded security standards. Some of the things we work with and I want internal documentation on:

Basic routing and switching on Cisco switches. Working on moving everything to catalyst 9000 series switches and chassis with some ISRs.

Layer 1, 2, 3 troubleshooting. We have gen 1 linkrunners, basic cable certifiers, an OTDR, and I'm trying to purchase etherscope NXGs as we move to be prevalent 10 gig with 100 gig backbone.

Solarwinds for monitoring, pushing out commands at scale, and assisting in mass upgrades (but most good feature sets aren't fully deployed even though we have almost every licensing features)

Cisco ISE for TACACS and device authorization

CUCM for phones- we at least had some Cisco engineers train us recently on this while we upgraded the server and setup a newer model for a refresh.

Cisco ACS-legacy TACACS that were moving from

Basic wireless troubleshooting even though its mostly contracted out

Hundreds of specialized systems and private networks within our network. Mostly we just need to provide LAN access to servers and their own firewall.

Certain specialized equipment that doesn't have publicly accessible documentation

Currently the way its going is that our tier 3 team is using sharepoint for administrative records and document, while our tier 1 is having management push out one note for day to day processes with our help. I am aware of resource like Cisco command lists for different models, various how to guides that I've stripped down to just what we need, etc. But I'm trying to figure out if there are only good resources or methods to quickly build up our library for non-enivornment specific information. I would like to not have to write everything from scratch. Currently we have one management person and two technical people who have the experience to actually write accurate and critique documentation, but the rest of the team can only do basic notes and troubleshooting.

I know its long so if you read through it all, I really appreciate it.



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