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I was thinking to myself earlier about starting a general change log in the IT office where I work. We are a team of three and while we do communicate verbally, we can all be a bit forgetful, or perhaps one of us is listening to music and doesn’t catch when someone calls out a “Oh, I changed this…” statement. I’m guilty of this.

One idea I had was to do a simple text file change log backed up to our SVN repo. Every time we make a change, we commit it, and our repo emails us all that an update has been made and what said update is.

One of my coworkers suggested using our intranet wiki site, which I’m not opposed to, but I would like something a little more private to the IT dept. Example, if one change is “updated user xxxx’s account to remove unnecessary permissions” and user xxxx just happens to try entering their name, they may quesiton why permissions were removed.

Does anyone else have ideas on how to log these general changes so there’s a way the team can be notified?

Thanks in advance spiceheads!

6 Spice ups
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I would just suggest a couple of things:

  1. Keep it simple. The easier it is to use, the more likely people will spend the time to enter the data
  2. If you can tie the process in with another part of issue management, it will be more likely to be entered.
2 Spice ups
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The last place I worked every day I logged my daily activity in ServiceNow as tasks, but those were easily ignored, even though my superior got a daily list of INT numbers. Here we use SpiceWorks but similarly the tickets are not really paid attenton to since I’m acting as Triage and handle quite a few tickets myself.

That’s why I was thinking about making a rolling change log, the changes could be saved, updates emailed to the whole team, and you could go back and look at the changes to see what was entered.

Things that have happened recently made me think about this, could have some simple changes logged like

04/29/19 - Updated password in database for db on server xxxxx
04/25/19 - added internal email distribution list xxxx@domain.com for temp management group
04/24/19 - changed community SNMP key for switch xxxx

None of those would have a ticket based off of how we normally operate.

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I would find One Note to be a better option, myself.

Much easier to do a screen snip which can often be more descriptive than text for some things like a column of settings, then put key words in a box next to the snip. You can keep separate sections for people changes, system changes, etc while still doing a search of the whole document if you aren’t sure where something may be stored. If you need to keep track of why you did something or justify it, drop in the file or email from ‘the boss’ or customer for later reference right next to the change details.

Consistency is definitely the key whichever method you decide on.

2 Spice ups
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I may give that a shot, we just got OneNote as part of O365, personally had it for years and never used it.

Thanks :slight_smile:

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you should be able to limit the privacy in your wiki site so that users can’t see any of the notes you guys make, but if something else works better than so be it.

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The first thing that has to happen is an agreement among your team that everything will be logged. Tools do not enforce compliance, so whatever you choose, there has to be commitment from all.

That being said, I would make the selection of a solution a team decision. If everyone doesn’t buy into it, it won’t matter what it is. Also, as one of the first posters said, it has to be kept simple.

So, things you need to do:

  • Commitment from all it will be used
  • Agreement on the quality/content of data to be recorded
  • Agreement on what mechanism is used (software, spreadsheet, etc)

From my own personal experience, a ticket system is good. It has the who, what, when, and why stuff covered, has built-in search, can enforce data entry, and is right there when a user request ends up turning into a server change instead of being a separate log.

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OneNote seconded. Simple, flexible.

1 Spice up