Computer Auditing Tools?

JediTrainer asks: "The issue recently came up in my organization that our hardware and software asset information needs to be gathered and stored so that we can import this data into an asset tracking database to further be able to deal with the data. Unfortunately because of circumstances it is difficult to send people to all locations to audit each piece by hand. Ideally, we'd like to be able to track specific information about the hardware (serial number if possible, memory, processor type/speed, hard disks etc), and also detect some of the major software packages that might be installed (OS, office suites, photo editors, development tools etc)."

"The company in question is mostly running Windows (9x/NT/2000) machines, but there are a number of Sun and Linux boxes which should be tracked as well, ideally, although we can probably get those by hand since they're the minority in this case.

So far in my search I've found Confound, which seems to do an ok job tracking hardware information on Win9x platforms, but unfortunately crashes on my NT box. Basically, the requirement will be to be able to run the software periodically remotely, either through login scripts or by sending the app via email to each employee. As much data as possible should be gathered about the hardware and software on that station, and then sent to a server where it will be stored and processed. As a company, we'd probably like to re-audit the computers in the organization every few months (at least once a year) to make sure the data's as clean as possible.

Does anyone have any products in mind that might do this? Obviously, cost is a factor (free is ideal, but it doesn't have to be - we could probably budget out a couple thousand dollars). The most ideal would be a solution with source code which I might be able to modify so that we can adjust what it gathered and how it is sent to the server, or at least be flexible in that way. Any product that meets this should reduce (but will not completely eliminate, I know) the need to have people physically do this work."

Comments

No option 1, or 2 really....

[TBone]

As of about a year ago, Unicenter's Asset Management software does not run on Linux. It does not run well on a number of UNIX's. it's really only good for tracking Windows workstations. It "supports" Linux in as far as tehre are some monitoring agents that run on it. However, it is far from a fully supported O/S across the baord of Unicenter applications.

As far as option 2, if they were interested in writing theor own application to collect all of this information, they wouldn't be telling us about their requirements and asking here about where to BUY Asset Management software. That being said, I tend to think that the only way you are going to get what you want is to do some writing on your own. Pick a piece of software that does most of what you want in Windows, find a standard format for reporting, then use shell scripts on your UNIX's to generate the appropriate information. You can use the various dmesg and /proc/sys info in Linux, the Symon stuff from Solaris, smit in AIX, etc etc etc.

This may be an option for you

[booyah]

I had to make sure that it wasn't one of my co-workers posting this question first, its very similar to my companies current situation. We invested in a software package called Visual Audit Pro from Vision Soft www.visionsoft.com... seems to be a decent program that can run at given intervals, and collects varying amounts of data (you can ask it to take more or less). seems to run well enough for us, but doesn't offer a *nix solution

Landesk blew up our PC's

[photozz]

nuf said. we dumped it in favor of SMS

SMS

[photozz]

The most powerful tool for doing what you are asking is going to be Microsoft SMS. The client piece can me installed through Novel login scripts, NT login scripts, by hand, or whatever. It can do hardware auto-discovery and monitoring, produce a list of what type of PC's, what hard drives and NIC's are present,..ECT... It can also push out software updated and automatically uninstall software that doesn't belong. It is a little pricey, but it should do everything you want and more. We are in the middle of an SMS roll out now, and it's looking cool.

Re:Microsoft SMS?

[dattaway]

A cheaper alternative is to call the BSA to handle all your auditing needs. They will fix you up with an offer you can't refuse

Unicenter TNG

[paulywog]

Option 1
The most prevelant asset managment package I've seen is Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG. This package has an incredible number of features depending upon how much you want to spend. Here's the package you're most interested in.

"Asset Managment Option"

The nice thing about Unicenter TNG is that it supports "DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, Macintosh, UNIX, and VMS." I believe that CA is also porting many of its applications to Linux. Check with your local sales associate for more information...

Option 2:
Build your own utility to get exactly the information you want. If you limit the set of information that you want to something fairly small, it shouldn't be too dificult to write a little client-server that sends asset data from each workstation to a server. Then you could make it cross-platform and Open Source it for the rest of us.

Here's a web based tool, Tech Tracker, that will do the tracking for you, but not automatically.