How to make an IDF closet look nice

Hello all,

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I am creating this out of frustration/desperation of our continuous, eventual decline of our IDF closet cable management and hoping to get some ideas as how to best cable manage our network closets.

Our IDF closets generally have a couple/few hundred ports, with anywhere from 2-4 stacked switches in them. We do not buy a device for every port, and use fixed length cables from typical vendors. Upon upgrades/clean outs I am generally happy with how the cable management is left after we are done, however over time every one looks awful. Our IDF closets use wall mounted vertical racks for our gear physically below the patch panels), while our patch panels are mounted typically in another wall mounted rack. Our cables typically plug into the switches, move to the left into the cable tray, and then up/over into the various patch panels.

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Issues I am facing:

1. Cable sag over time. This causes the cables to sag over switch ports and makes it difficult to physically get our fingers in there to move cable around when the persistent employee relocations occur.
2. The general layout of our closets. I hate it, but just accept it as this was the space that was provided to us.
3. Having many more patch panel ports (many wall plates per office, with lets say 4 terminations per wall plate, to allow desk/office customization) than switch ports causes the patch panel location to look...scraggly at best
4. Using fixed length cables causes a lot of slack at some points. I always measure and use the least amount of footage required but within the cable tray (which does have a cover and pretty well hides the "mess") can look scraggly as well. We use velcro wraps to tie our bundles together.
5. Employee moves will cause us to pull/move a cable that was in (lets say) patch panel port 2, and move it to port 48. The extra length required causes us to pull the cable entirely, and put in a new one. As we have bundles already in place it is a huge hassle to undo the velcro at every wrap "point", add the cable, and retie it. Also as the original cable was pulled and another added it never rejoins the bundle as nicely as the previous cable did. The amount of "twisted" bundles we have over time makes it looks like we never cared to begin with.

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In an ideal world I'd like to have a switchport per patch panel port so I can never have to walk in there again and just shut/no shut ports down as needed after documentation between patch panel ports and switch ports are done. However we use Cisco and don't have money burning a hole in our pockets. I have looked at other vendors to save money and make this happen but those with the power to make it happen don't like the idea of so many "wasted" ports on the switches (I don't necessarily blame them, but it sucks).

I am praying some here have some ideas that I haven't thought of/discussed with my coworkers to potentially resolve our issues.