Document physical reality

Record cabinets, patching, switch locations, uplinks, circuits, access points and power dependencies. A logical diagram cannot tell an engineer which patch panel or fibre pair must be touched during an outage or office change.

Document logical intent

Capture VLANs, subnets, routing domains, firewall boundaries, VPNs, DHCP scopes and important DNS dependencies. The document should explain why segmentation exists rather than presenting only a list of configured objects.

Include ownership and provider information

Record circuit references, support contacts, contract details, managed-service boundaries and escalation routes. During a major incident, finding who owns the failed component should not require reconstructing procurement history.

Keep documentation coupled to change

Documentation should be updated as part of the change lifecycle, not as a separate clean-up project. Automate discovery where practical, but preserve reviewed diagrams and decision records for design intent that automated inventories cannot infer.

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