In my work as a consultant I often have many small tasks to perform for customers, all while completing a bigger project. I have found that an easy way to keep track of all the little and big changes, is to create a ChangeLog. Normally ChangeLog’s are referenced in development projects, but it also sense to use it to track of your own, or your team members, changes to an infrastructure environment.
As for just about everything else, I use Markdown to make it easy to format and edit.
Example#
Currently, I use the following format to keep track of changes done to a customer environment
Completed#
Date Task By| 14.02.2015 | ChangeLog created | CM |
| 15.02.2015 | Upgraded vCenter Operations Manager 5.8.3 Build 2076729 to 5.8.4 (Build 2199700) | CM |
| 16.02.2015 | Updated _vCSA01_ from 5.5.0.20000 Build 2063318 til 5.5.0.20400 (Build 2442330) | CM |
| 16.02.2015 | Updated _esxi01_ from 5.5.0 (Build 1623387) til 5.5.0 (Build 2456374) | CM |
| 16.02.2015 | Updated _esxi02_ from 5.5.0 (Build 1623387) til 5.5.0 (Build 2456374) | CM |
| 16.02.2015 | Updated _esxi03_ from 5.5.0 (Build 1623387) til 5.5.0 (Build 2456374) | CM |
As you can see this a quick and easy way to document changes. Since the markdown files are pure text files, they can easily be converted to other formats with Pandoc, or checked into a “code”-repository for easy retrieval.
Do you use a ChangeLog for your infrastructure, or how do you quickly document changes in your environment?