I see many posts in the forum without answer and some basic things unresolved.
For example, why would we want the “BackOffice Asset Hostname” field empty?:
I find the solution on that particular post very amusing. It is like “my car is making some loud noise when braking” and the solution being “turn up the radio volume!”
Being serious, I can’t find some decent documentation on the project. In your user experience is Ralph 3 worthwhile or is it dying?
It’s not a dead project. Like any Open Source project, it has a limited number of developers and contributors, and limited documentation. And it is also one of the only completely-free projects in the asset management/CMDB space, which means there’s no paid support to fund the work.
That is more or less par for the course for specialized OSS.
Is it worth it? Only you can answer that. But there are not many options in this space, very few of those options are completely free, and there’s only partial overlap among them.
For example, Snipe It is a pretty detailed asset tracking package with an API, but it is really geared at office equipment, consumables, and licensing. There’s no rack or data center management features. It doesn’t really do configuration management, just pure asset tracking.
Rack Tables is fairly feature rich when it comes to data center management. It’s been around a long time, and has decent configuration management capabilities, but it lacks detailed asset management (to the level of what Ralph or Snipe It provide). And even after years of development and years of people asking for it, there is still no API.
Ralph has a lot of breadth, and pockets of depth. Decent level of configuration management with some holes, good asset tracking with some holes, etc. Has a pretty rich API that is largely self-documenting and easy to figure out.
They all have their shortcomings. They all have odd gaps. They all have issues with documentation. They all have issues that go unresolved.
If you want more than that, then you need to go commercial.
Hi folks. New here. I stumbled upon this project which seems perfect as intermediate solution until our monster cmdb is ready in a century or two. But it seems that two active contributors doing this in their free-time without pay seems not motivating. I don’t see there will be any release that runs on latest OS/packages (i.e. Ubuntu 22.04) anytime soon.
Is there any solution to this situation? Like funding/donating certain features? Or will it be alright if I just wait long enough:) (Really, our cmdb won’t be ready for ages…)
It’s a good question. It’s got some rough edges, but if you’re willing to work around them, it can be useful.
I think the most difficult thing to deal with is the idea that the UI isn’t really complete and some things have to be done via API.
All that said, we’ve found it to be useful as a source of truth for assets, and you could, theoretically, use the API to fully automate asset imports and exports.