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Ask HN: Best way to create a searchable knowledge base?

20 points aljgz | 1 comments | 16 Oct 25 17:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source

Have you had the experience of using/developing knowledge bases? Here is my scenario:

My team is dealing with a lot of information: Wikis, Code repos, Monitoring dashboards, internal chat messages, emails, Task tickets, related systems, etc.

There are many cases when we need to do ad-hoc searches for anything related to a concept. For instance, imagine if someone makes a change to a metric, there is a need to find all dashboards that might be using this metric to make sure they are still valid after the change.

I don't want to just fix this problem, but create the ability to find related information in ad-hoc cases.

The ramp-up time is not important, as long as some positive value can be created with a small initial effort.

Any existing products (Paid/Free/Open Source, etc) and any references to existing knowledge (designs, discussions) about this would be really appreciated.

1. comprev ◴[17 Oct 25 19:30 UTC] No.45620993[source]▶
I'm a firm believer in having a single source of truth and that's often a Jira ticket ID in the corporate world. On Jira you can either directly link to another item, link to a Confluence page or leave a comment with the unique string (if the boards are not connected).

Every git branch and commit contains a Jira ID string, even down to "description" fields in resource properties or meta tags.

The idea is a future engineer who I will never meet has a starting point to understand the context of the change.

Projects on GitLab get a "release" too which contains the Jira ID, or possibly multiple in the auto-generated CHANGELOG.

It's not perfect and does require good discipline however I feel a professional responsibility to make the extra effort.