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2023

The future of As Built Report

In my previous post I shared how I came to start As Built Report and my reasons for doing so. It's been a few years since its inception and some of you may be asking what does the future hold for the project?

Before I delve into what may lie ahead, let me take a moment to reflect on the project's progression so far, by extending a sincere thank you to all the contributors who have given their time and effort to this project. Whether you have contributed code, reported bugs, provided feedback, written a blog post, or simply participated in discussions, your efforts have not gone unnoticed.

The history of As Built Report

The Beginning

Back in 2017, having worked on designing and implementing VMware solutions for almost a decade, I became frustrated with having to repeatedly produce as-built documentation for my virtualisation projects.

At the time, I was designing and implementing 2-3 VMware solutions per month. Each solution would be designed using numerous technology partners, each with their own range of compute, storage, networking and backup technologies.

My methods to create as-built documentation was arduous, time consuming and error prone. It often involved extracting information using a combination of vendor supplied tools and community developed scripts, and manually transposing information from the vCenter console into a Word document. It was tedious and often resulted in a poorly constructed and formatted document.

It was also around this time that I realised I had a strong desire to learn PowerShell after seeing many of my co-workers starting to write scripts to automate simple, repeatable tasks. Until this moment, I had never taken the time to completely understand the fundamentals of PowerShell, nor had I worked to develop and expand my knowledge in any form of scripting or automation.

As a result, I saw this as an opportunity to learn and employ PowerShell automation to ease my pain and frustrations with producing as-built documentation. And so began my mission to create As Built Report!