I like RANCID a lot, and this is the first time I’ve found a presentation from someone else about the kind of things I like to do with RANCID.
http://www.denog.de/meetings/denog2/pdf/010-Stoegbauer-RANCID_on_Speed.pdf
RANCID is pretty handy by itself – allowing you to actually know that the config for customer X hasn’t been changed in months, or verify that changes happening actually have corresponding change control tickets, as well as simply having a backup of everything and an automatic inventory (need all the serial numbers of all the WS-X6748-GE-TX cards in your network? It’s just a grep away). Since it all goes into version control (Subversion or CVS), you can do all this for last week, or last year, too. Useful for when your maintenance contract still lists the original serial number for that module that got RMAed 6 months ago, instead of the new one.
Internally, we have tools based around the Net::Netblock and Cisco::Reconfig perl modules and a bunch of hacks to generate things like hourly-updated, always accurate maps of what VLANs are in use where, what IP ranges are in use where, by VRF, which devices have an interface in that subnet on that VLAN and so on, all generated from collected configs in RANCID.
If you have a network of more than a few devices, and especially if you need to suddenly start answering “compliance” kinds of questions (where are your backups? can you prove they are regular? can you show the last change on that device? can you regularly verify that all devices have telnet disabled?) then you really should spend that afternoon setting it up. You’ll feel better for it.