Transcript
Now that we've structured some of our Hoodoo instance and created a sample company, it's now time to explore Hoodoo's core tools, which you probably noticed as soon as the company was created. Hoodoo offers a suite of tools to organize and manage your data. In this video, we will introduce you to each tool and the purpose it serves. Starting off with the password section of Hoodoo, this tool functions as a centralized list to easily find whatever password I need. I can start by creating my first password in Hoodoo. This allows me to store the username, password, and OTP code and other information about these credentials, which I will easily be able to access later both through Hoodoo itself as well as the browser extension. If I ever wanted to add this password to a folder, I could go ahead and create a folder and then place that password in it. Or if I wanted to add a tag to it, I could do that here. Now that I have this password created, I can go ahead and see it in the table view for this company. I could also use Hoodoo's Pwned feature to make sure that the password I have added is secure and hasn't been found on the dark web. In this case, I see it has quite a few breaches, so I should probably go ahead and change it. Going back in to edit the password, I will go ahead and use Hoodoo's password generator to create a password for me. As an admin setting, you'll have options to customize password requirements with password generator defaults like length, word count, and more. Once I have the password that I desire, I can go ahead and update that password. Now let's say I need to share this password out to an end user. I could easily create a share link here to do so. In this case, I'll go ahead and have it expire after 30 minutes and send over the username and password and have it expire after the first view. I can then choose to share by copying to my clipboard or sending via email. Another important aspect of documentation is creating relationships, so I will also go ahead and add this password as a child password to the asset that we created earlier. This allows me to ensure that I have the full picture of my documentation. Now I am able to jump straight into this asset from the password and vice versa, ensuring I am always one click away from the information I need access to. Next, we will jump into processes, which serve as step-by-step guides for completing your day-to-day tasks and your SOPs. With processes, you can ensure your technicians are staying on task with reproducible results. You are able to create a process in a couple different ways, one off in this company, creating a global process template to standardize a process across all companies for reuse, or you can do either of these options by using Hoodoo's screen capture feature. As I open up the browser extension, which you can enable in the external app section of Hoodoo, one of the options I can choose from is screen capture. As I start the capture, each click that I make will be automatically documented inside of the extension. Whether I am creating an onboarding process, new user setup, or any other SOP that I want documented, using the screen capture method will allow me to instantly document that process or KB article without breaking my workflow. As soon as I am done with this workflow, I can now go ahead and save this as a process or as a KB article in its respective area. In this instance, I will go ahead and save it as a company process. We'll go ahead and name it quick, and then we'll go ahead and save it to the company that we have already created. Now I can go through this process, making edits to the names of tasks as well as adding notes to the images that I have just captured. If I would have started this process directly in Hoodoo, I would have had this same functionality. Once we make any changes needed, I'll go ahead and update this process. Now that the process is created within this company, I can go through it checking off the steps as they are completed, assign users to the process, select due dates, priority levels, and writing completion notes once a task is finished. I can also easily copy all of my completed tasks back to a PSA ticket if needed. Now that this process is created, I can also mark it as a global process template, which will be created here in the admin section of Hoodoo. If this was an onboarding process, I could mark it as such, which will automatically feature it on the overview of all spaces until it is completed. Onboarding could be for client-level onboarding, asset documentation onboarding, and new employee onboarding. Now that I have this process marked as a global process template, if I need to kick off this process again within this company, I now have the option to start a process from that template we just created. Now I just mentioned that I could have saved that workflow as a KB article as well, which gives us a perfect segue into this section. The KB section of Hoodoo can be served as a repository of my articles and documents, making it easy to find whatever information I need to. If you get a ticket come in and you don't know how to solve that ticket, Hoodoo's KB section should be the place to look. I can start by creating a new article, and in this instance we'll go ahead and start from scratch naming our article. Once I click create, I can now use the WYSIWYG editor to start documenting. Here I have the ability to use different headers, which will create a table of contents for the article, add in block quote and inline code where needed, as well as callouts. And just like that with the snap of my fingers, once I have finished writing this article, I can go ahead and save it as a draft or publish. Similarly to what I did with the password and contact earlier, I can also go ahead and relate this article to that contact as they are in charge of updating Docker. Now through time, this article is going to change and get updated, and as it does, Hoodoo will keep a full version history of that article. At any point, I can see all the versions of the article I have ever had. In this section, I'm able to see who made changes and when they were done. If I wanted to see the direct changes that were made in any version, I can click compare differences, which will show me the div of the article and show me exactly what was added in and taken out from any respective version. In this case, we are talking about KB articles, but this version history feature will apply to many other core tools and all of your assets as well. Now we've spent our time in this company's KB section, but note you do also have that central KB for articles that are applicable across all of your companies. The next core tool in Hoodoo is photos. This tool ensures that you have physical images of key items along with your written documentation. Photos can be added to Hoodoo through the photos module itself or through the mobile app, both from your camera roll as well as the app itself. We will dive more into the mobile app in a future video. Photos can also live on other documentation as well. If I go back to that KB article that we just created, I can now go ahead and attach a photo to it, which will also automatically add that photo to the photo section. I can now jump back into the photo section and see that photo available for me, and I could also go ahead and create a new folder for the structure and organization of my photo management. We now jump into IPAM or IP address management. IP addresses can get messy quickly if they aren't documented, so this section allows me to easily solve for this. We can start by creating a new network, VLAN, or VLAN zone. Eventually, once I have added in all of these items across this company, I will easily be able to identify which networks are a part of certain VLANs and which VLANs correspond to certain VLAN zones. I can get started by creating a VLAN zone. To do this, I will need to add in the name, description, and a VLAN ID range. Now that this is filled out, I will go ahead and create that VLAN zone. Now it's time to also create the VLANs to give me the full high-level picture of my network documentation before I actually add in the networks. As I go in to create a VLAN, I will have to fill out information such as the VLAN ID, name, VLAN zone if applicable, a description, and any notes about this particular VLAN. Once I have the VLAN information populated, I'll go ahead and create this VLAN. Now I can go ahead and create a network for this particular company. I can start by adding in the CIDR range along with whatever other information I want about this network, including selecting that VLAN that we just created. Status and role are added using lists, which can be created and applied in the admin section of Hoodoo. Once I finish up populating this information, I can go ahead and create the network. Once the network is created, I can then start adding the IP addresses within the network and the devices that they correspond to. Once I finish going through this network, it should look something like this. As a reminder, so far this is all entered in manually, but you also can import this information in, set up an integration with one of our monitoring tools to automatically populate this information, use Hoodoo's REST API to provide various automations to any of these core tools, or use Hoodoo Radar. Hoodoo Radar is an external application that scans available networks to gather information about those networks and connected devices. It's an optional add-on product for Hoodoo users, designed to offer insights into network environments with ease. We have a full separate video series on Hoodoo Radar, so if this is something you're interested in, make sure to check out that series in the Hoodoo Community Academy. Just like IP addresses, rack storages can also get messy if they aren't documented. Hoodoo's rack management tool allows you to document out your racks to ensure that every device is accounted for, and if a technician ever needs to go on site, they have the full layout of the rack and can easily find a device on that rack. Now to start building out a rack, I first need to go to the admin section of Hoodoo and into IPAM and racks. Jumping back to that IPAM section, this is actually where we set those lists for network statuses and network roles. Now to start building out a rack, I first need to set some rack storage roles. When I add a new rack storage role, I can specify the name, description, and associate a color to that specific role. This is going to be important when we are actually building out the rack. Once I have my roles created, I can now jump back into our sample company and start building out this rack. To get started, I need to name my rack, select the starting unit, and the initial height of that rack. I can also choose whether I want my rows in ascending or descending order. Once the rack is created, I can now start adding my devices on the rows they correspond to. In this example, I've created a new asset type, servers, as you can see on the left-hand sidebar. Now when I go to select a row on this rack, I can select how many rows it takes up, what side of the rack it is on, and what device is actually being used on those rows. In addition, I can select a role based off of those rack roles that we selected earlier, and I could also track the power draw and max wattage of the rack by adding them in for each device on that rack as well. Now I can go through and add the rest of the devices I want documented on this rack. I could also add a photo of the rack, similarly to what we did earlier, or I can print out a line-by-line copy of the rack if I ever need to. For both the racks and IPAM section of Hoodoo, locations can be assigned. To see the location dropdown when creating or editing a network or rack, an asset layout needs to be assigned to use for locations. We can do this by going into that asset layout, hit edit, and go ahead and check this box, use for locations. Make sure to update the asset layout when you're finished. Now keep in mind, only one asset layout can be used for locations, and you'll be able to see that in your table view of your asset layouts. That brings us to websites, which allows me to monitor all websites that I want to track for a given company. I can start by adding in a website that I want to track and monitor within this company. When I am adding the website, I have the option to disable and enable certain monitoring features like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF tracking. Once I have everything set the way I want it, I can go ahead and create the website. Once all of the information loads in, I'm able to see the status, domain expiration, and SSL expiration for this website. In addition, I can see all of the other information I chose to track for this website here as well. The expirations for the website are easily identifiable here, but our next section will dive more into additional expiration tracking in Hoodoo. Expirations are extremely important to be tracked, managed, and get notified about so you can ensure to renew items as they are needed, and that brings us to our final core tool, expirations. As I just mentioned, all website expirations are automatically added to this section, but you are also able to track expirations for many other things throughout Hoodoo, like this Microsoft 365 license expiration we set earlier. Let's go back to that article we created earlier, and let's say in this case I want to audit this article every six months to ensure it doesn't need to be updated. Therefore, I could go ahead and click more and set an expiration date for this article. Once I do so, this expiration will be automatically added to our expirations list. As we covered in our former video on asset layouts, I could also use the date field type to set expirations for any of my assets. Some examples of this could be warranty expirations or license renewals. Now of course, setting the expiration is one thing, but just as important is getting notified when expirations are occurring, and that brings us to alerts. As I jump back into the admin section and into alerts, here I can set up an alert for all of the expirations that I just set up. When sending alerts through Hoodoo, you can send them to an email address or configure a webhook. Now I know this was a lot to cover in one video, so take some time and go explore all of these core tools for yourself in the company you have created. Add a password, create an SOP, and put in a company website. As you do so, take some time to visualize how all of these core tools and assets work together in Hoodoo to create a full picture of your documentation. Thank you so much for watching, and once you feel like you have a good understanding of the core tools in Hoodoo, feel free to join us for the next video where we will continue to explore the possibilities of Hoodoo.
