Show HN: Open IT Maintenance Planner
maintenance-planner.vangemert.dev
Made and open-sourced a little web-based tool I use to generate maintenance plans for IT. Let me know what you think, contributions are welcome!
maintenance-planner.vangemert.dev
However, as a new user it's not immediately clear where to click, for example the button in the top left corner which lets you switch between the plan and the diagram editor. Also the small sidebar for inputting the data might not be the most optimal place to do the data input.
What is the goal of the application? What is the benefit of having the diagram? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose but to me it seems like the main output from this software is the "maintenance table", but how do the pointers/diagram help instead of just having a dropdown in the table?
Maybe you can share a more elaborate example and then I understand it better.
Overall, could be more polished but I really like the simplicity and the combination of table & visualization.
Let me illustrate a bit what my motivation was:
Q: What is the goal of the application?
A: The goal of this application for me personally is to communicate the impact of IT maintenance towards product managers and the rest of the team, in a language that they understand (which is table and architecture diagram).
Q: What is the benefit of having the diagram?
A: Personally, a diagram helps me to understand things better than a big Excel sheet would.
Q: Maybe I'm misunderstanding the purpose but to me it seems like the main output from this software is the "maintenance table", but how do the pointers/diagram help instead of just having a dropdown in the table?
A: You're exactly getting it. The goal is the "maintenance table". I draw the IT architecture diagram (which is how I think about IT in my head), then add periodic tasks to them (maintenance plans), and then it renders the maintenance table automatically. I guess you could also just make a big Excel sheet?
It's way past bedtime here, going to get some sleep and will check later again.
Another thing. Regarding the field "effort" it is measured in days, it should IMO be measured in hours, or even better yet be user configurable.
I like your suggestion. I was doubting a lot between hours and days and eventually settled on days because I noticed product managers (in bigco) making rough estimates based on "fractions of FTEs over a quarter", so days are granular enough for me to get my point across, but maybe people prefer to calculate in hours... I think it shouldn't be so hard to make hours/days configurable in the "Effort" modal.
Dump of related thoughts: - Should hours vs. days be a global setting? Or per maintenance plan? - How many hours are in a day? 8? More? Another config? - People can put fractions of a day (like 0.125). Maybe this is fine already?
In another piece somewhere he also states, that the engineer working on the thing should estimate the hours, because everyone has a different skillset and that then relates to the task and how long it takes.
You might want to include a screenshot of a real-looking plan to give people an idea.