Men and Mice DDI Software

Introducing Micetro!

I was privileged to attend Tech Field Day 27 in Silicon Valley in March 2023

Tech Field Day is a fantastic event where IT specialists from all over the world are brought together to view presentations from companies bringing us new exciting software and hardware like micetro.

Men&Mice

Men&Mice created micetro which is DDI software. That translates to DHCP, DNS and IPAM. When I heard of them my first thought was “if only they had been around back in the day when I was trying to administer systems with a team of less than 5!” However, after watching their presentation I realized these folks have a platform that is much more than just a life saver for those myriads of small IT crews out there trying to manage big systems.

So what exactly is micetro and what are these folks from Men&Mice bringing to the proverbial IT table of tools.

In a nutshell micetro brings an overlay to DDI. An abstraction layer that allows you to have a single pane of glass in order to manager your DHCP, DNS and IPAM. If you have ever administered the latter then I don’t have to tell you what can happen when your systems start to grow. What was once a nice and simple spreasheet turns into a bowl of spaghetti with sauce for obfuscation and you find yourself in critical situations trying to unravel this networking mess.

Micetro does not just give you a fancy panel where you can imperatively take action but also comes with a set of APIs allowing you to also follow a declarative path in your system’s setup.

Further more micetro can span not only on premises networks but also your networks in the cloud making it a true single source of truth.

Being able to hover over all of your networks comes with an added benefit, the ability to help you with seamless migrations.

I did have a concern that this wonder tool might just have too much power and the last thing that I or any seasoned administrator wants is something that can be leveraged to wreak destruction but this has also been addressed by the folks at Men&Mice. Micetro connects to your existing DNS and DHCP setups in a non-authoritative method and has they explained “it exists as a non destructive element in your environment”.

You don’t have to believe them or me, go take a look at the documentation: https://www.menandmice.com/docs/latest/guides/user-manual/introduction

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Lastly it goes without saying that having a well documented easy to administer DNS, DHCP and IPAM system can help combat that one dreadful element that lurks almost in every IT environment Technical Debt! Gone are the days of “hey does anyone know what 192.168.158 is?, it looks like it has not been rebooted in years!”

Head on to Men&Mice and take a look for yourself: https://www.menandmice.com/live-demo