What do you use for DCIM that doesn't cost more than the servers?

¡The software expensive! I look for tool to track the server red, the cable blue, the PDU old. The Nlyte cost more than the rack itself. The Sunbird same. I try the Excel but the version control ¡disaster!

In my last job we use the spreadsheet shared, someone delete the row, poof, the server gone. Not really gone, but in the sheet gone, same problem.

What you use? Open source? Cheap? The Access database? I hear story of the airline scheduler with the Access magic. Tell me.

Transparency: we ran Excel for 18 months. Blameless postmortem after the "server that didn't exist" incident—two racks off books, still drawing power, error budget blown on discovery not prevention.

Moved to NetBox (open source). Not DCIM proper but IPAM + DCIM overlap. Good enough for our scale. Costs labor, not license.

For real DCIM: honest about outages, honest about budget. Most $50K suites promise single pane of glass, deliver seven tabs of frustration. Transparency means admitting when free beats expensive.