How to maintain technical documentation for a System Administrator?

Question

Documentation

Tell me who is more experienced. What should a system administrator's technical documentation look like? Or is it all done randomly?

Answer 1

With experience, the understanding came that it should be like this:
1) You go to the accounting department, take a list of property that is on you / in the department, go through everything - you check it, right down to the old headset, everything should converge. The same goes for software licenses. You must at any time say exactly where, what and how much you have, how much is in stock, what you ordered, what has arrived and whether it has arrived. For accounting, these are all boxes with light bulbs. NECESSARILY! serial numbers should be beaten. If they are not required to assign inventory. Even on a printer cartridge. If conditional Sveta from logistics brought her mouse, you should have it displayed. Everything with the fleet of cars happens only with your knowledge.
Don't be afraid to contact management - they will appreciate that you are saving them money.
Everything that you give out - give out against signature. It disciplines.
2) Network diagram. Video surveillance and telephony. Both drawn and WeatherMap in Cacti. Many neglect it, how much in vain. You should always know what is going on with your communication channels. All vlans, all addresses, location must be reflected and signed. All racks and cabinets should be photographed so that there is a clear understanding of what-where-why.
Believe me, in the event of an accident, this will greatly reduce your recovery time.
3) Equipment marking. Everything, no, not so - EVERYTHING!!! must be signed. All sockets, all patches. In general, everything!
4) You make yourself a local wiki, FSUs on what and write ABSOLUTELY everything there. How to set up a port on the switch, a set of basic commands, diagnostics, firmware version, some basic configuration. Keep configuration backups in text form, do not trust any .cfg, how to set up a vlan on a micro, how to raise a VPN to a neighboring office.
It will greatly reduce your time, especially some operations should be carried out quite rarely.
5) Write scripts for routine. Scripts should also be on the wiki.
Let's upgrade 5 switches or fix the ACL lightly. What if there are 50 of them? 150?
6) The wiki should not contain any links to third-party resources. Tomorrow the page will move, and you were hoping for it.
7) You should have contacts of all service providers in your department: providers, tankers, engineers, city networks, contract numbers, and other garbage. If something happens, you should get answers very quickly, and not wait on the hotline. Keep your contacts up to date.
8) To make it all make any sense, spend 1 hour a day doing documentation. Otherwise it's all bullshit.

Answer 2

I use - OutWiker .

Answer 3

You don’t need to maintain technical documentation at all, everything should be in the system administrator’s head. Some pluses:
1) Memory training.
2) Nobody needs your documentation, because you already know everything, and your successor still won’t figure out what you’ve done there, they’ll crash everything and set it up again, according to their requirements.
3) Do you have nothing else to do to waste time maintaining what no one else will read except you?