Best Tools For Network Inventory Management?

jra writes "Once every month or so, people ask here about backups, network management, and so on, but one topic I don't see come up too often is network inventory management — machines, serial numbers, license keys, user assignments, IP addresses, and the like. This level of tracking is starting to get out of hand in my facility as we approach 100 workstations and 40 servers, and I'm looking for something to automate it. I'm using RT (because I'm not a good enough Web coder to replace it, not because I especially like it) and Nagios 3. I've looked at Asset Tracker, but it seems too much like a toolkit for building things to do the job, and I don't want my ticket tracking users to have to be hackers (having to specify a URL for an asset is too hackish for my crew). I'd prefer something standalone, so I don't have to dump RT or Nagios, but if something sufficiently good looking comes by, I'd consider it. I'd like to be able to hack a bit here and there, if I must. Perl and Python, along with C, are the preferred implementation languages; least favorite is Java. Anyone care to share their firsthand experiences with this topic, and what tools they use (or built) to deal with it? "

Comments

Numara Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Track-It! = Helpdesk, SNMP Discovery and Audit, Windows Discovery and Audit, plus a few more goodies

User, not a Sales Rep, but still a Coward

Re:Numara Software

[groslyunderpaid]

I've used Trackit, and it is ok. Having used nothing else, scaled of 1-10 with 10 best, I'd give it a very solid 7.

It identifies computers wonderfully, most of the time pulling maker, model, serial, os, and system specs.

It can pull printers though it doesn't get any real info other than ip and smb name.

It can ping other devices such as routers and pbx, but didn't provide any info on the version I used.

Re:Numara Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Track it, and find it incredibly easy to use, both for techs and end users. Automated discovery of new machines , license tracking and auditing makes keeping tabs on 150 machines easy.

Landesk might work for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Landesk, it also does patches, AV, hardware inventory, software inventory, you can block some applications, remote control, etc.

you track your IP addresses?

[Em Emalb]

Are you not using DHCP? I ask cause if you aren't....uh...why not?

Here at my company we're looking at a few different things, right now we have it up on an internal wiki page and it sucks...but the process has been back-burnered like 10 times already.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[huckda]

spiceworks?

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Em Emalb]

Also, the key thing for where I work is the ability to bar-code scan (for example) the service tags and vendor codes on our desktop/laptops and have that populate a DB as well..along with everything else.

It's a huge undertaking though, to get everything in order. It's really something that needs to be done right from the start, or when you fork-lift laptops or something. Sucks. I swear you could hire a team of monkeys to do this year round and they'd still be lagging behind after 2 months.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Anonymous Coward]

spiceworks?

Toseethefuture?

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[exes]

Would you recommend DHCP for network switches? I ask cause if you would....uh...why?

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Em Emalb]

In most companies I've been around or worked for, the number of users far far out-paced the number of switches, servers and routers.

So yes, you are correct, you'd need to track at least 1 IP for each of those devices, and exclude the rest from your DHCP pool(s).

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[afidel]

Servers=static
Printers=static
network gear=static
random network devices=static

In any non-trivial network you will have a significant percentage of your IP space utilized by static devices. Then you get into tracking multiple sites and their associated network information and it starts to get fairly complicated. We're small enough with a couple dozen sites and a dozen or so subnets at our corporate campus that we use a multi-tabbed excel document with the first tab being a table of contents.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Kizeh]

Servers = static or reserved DHCP
Printers = reserved DHCP
Network gear = static, but competely under control, right?
Random network devices = reserved DHCP (signage, VoIP phones, card access, cameras, speakers, projectors, control processors, energy management etc.)

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[socsoc]

Spiceworks is what I use and I'm pretty impressed by it. It does *some* software license management and machine auditing, but it's really great at tracking your assets with NICs. It's more manual, but I track other assets with it too. I haven't used it's ticketing system at all...

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Anonymous Coward]

DHCP is not approprate for everything on a network. For example, making your firewall and routers DHCP dependent would be pretty foolish.Y

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[groslyunderpaid]

I started a new systems admin job 4 months ago. When I arrived:

routers at all locations = static
printers = static
servers = static
pc's, laptops, and thin clients in 10 different cities = static

And the best part about it was, I have a strong windows background, and was replacing a gentleman with a AIX background. Classic.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[scubamage]

We don't use DHCP at our site, and we've got a good number more servers/workstations than the OP. Well, I fib a little. We have a DHCP range of about 100 addresses for users and administration. Everything else gets a static IP. Our reasoning is because we use a lot of server link aggregation/teaming, and certain vendors don't give the aggregated port a static MAC address. Because of this, it can boot up differently each time and since DHCP reservations are based on MAC address.. well, you can see the problem. We could fix this if we ever chose to use a directory service like ActiveDirectory, but at our facility there really isn't much need for it.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[medlefsen]

There is no reason to add the dependency of a DHCP server to many of those services. Reserved DHCP works great under some situations but if you're talking about a static set of servers or equipment, static ip is more reliable.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you get kickbacks from some DHCP consortium or something?

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[PitaBred]

Seconded. The main benefit of what you propose (for those who may still not understand why) is that the implementation is the documentation. You simply look at the DHCP setups for various servers, etc. to find their IP, and it's always right, you don't have to wonder if spacey Joe forgot to update the damn Excel spreadsheet when he changed the printer. AGAIN.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[afidel]

Bingo, KISS. It's also why I like static routes in a small to midsized environment, there's no additional moving parts to potentially break.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Auntie Virus]

So do hard-coded static on the device and add it as a reservation on the DHCP server. That way, all of your IP addresses are in 1 place, the DHCP server.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[emeitner]

I've found that tracking IP allocations in the reverse DNS zone files work best for me. A machine is either in the DHCP pool range or it gets a static IP documented in the x.y.10.in-addr.arpa files and probably the forward zone file. Lastly, changes are tracked with subversion.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Em Ellel]

There is no reason to add the dependency of a DHCP server to many of those services. Reserved DHCP works great under some situations but if you're talking about a static set of servers or equipment, static ip is more reliable.

Depends on your situation and your resources. A while ago I did a favor for a friend in a mid size office (300 people or so) lacking a real sysadmin where they asked me to re-ip the entire network on a short notice. Luckily I had the foresight to make sure just about everything was on DHCP or static DHCP. With renewal time lowered to 24 hours - this gave me a 12 hour window - perfect for overnight reset. During the day I wrote a quick script to dump out, massage and re-write the static IPs in DHCP DB. After everyone gone home that night, all I had to do is change IPs on a the few static servers (DHCP server mostly) - activate the new DHCP scope and go home. 1/2 hour worth of work. Next morning everything was up and running, and for the few people who complained(there are always a few), a reboot fixed everything.

So yes, static IPs are more reliable on small network or if you are well staffed and have time to burn. But there is value in static DHCP when you are understaffed. Of course it makes it much more important to keep the DHCP server up, but hey, you still have at least 1/2 your renewal time to fix it and hopefully you are monitoring your DHCP server.

-Em

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've found this works, well enough. Where I end up having trouble is someone at Level3 or Alternet decides to change a BGP entry. Then the rest of the internet figures it out 30 minutes later, oops. In the meantime the VPN tunnel has broken and the DHCP lease has expired on the client, the branch calls, "OMG ZEE INTERNET IS BROKEN" Everything accept the router and the CSU is now offline. Yay! Go DHCP Reservations!

It was because of this scenario we started pushing dhcp reservations back out to the branch equipment. We used to run rancid to backup the config every day, but now we push changed configs down to the remote devices from central, which has turned out to be better loads better for change tracking when Joe decides that ZOMG, the bitches in Memphis don't need to watch Hulu.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[shitzu]

Yes, i would. Because then the ip information is always in one place - DHCP server - and there will be no conflicts and this information is *always* up to date. If a device needs a static address (e.g. a server or switch) i just assign it an IP address according to its MAC address in DHCP server. Everything else gets an address from the dynamic range.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[Bert64]

Making the DHCP server use DHCP is more amusing...

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[elnyka]

Are you not using DHCP? I ask cause if you aren't....uh...why not?

How do DHCP for dedicated servers, switches and stuff like that?

That was a rhetorical question mind you. Sometimes even for workstations you don't use dynamic IP address (or at least leave the lease timeout set to forever) so that power users can remote connect to them from home.

Just because you have DHCP, that doesn't mean the IP addresses change with every boot. And you might be able to get the current IP-to-MAC mappings from a DHCP server, but from there you have to tie up the MAC address to a specific logical identifier to a PC and all its attributes of interest (current location within a building complex, currently assigned user, lease expiration date, associated inventory, and yada yada yada ad infinitum.)

To be fair, I almost never found it useful to maintain an IP-to-host mapping and keep it up to date (except for dedicated hardware.) But an org might ask you to do so (justifiably or not) and one has to suck it up and find a way to do it well.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[exes]

I hope your DHCP *never* goes down.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[jra]

My approach is to use static addresses for servers and network switch management consoles, and fixed-lease DHCP for everything else, personally.

We're big enough that I've ripped off 10.10/16 and 10.11/16 for our 2 campuses, and I block certain categories of stuff into specific class-Cs. I'm not fond of overloading semantics on addresses, but sometimes you just have to...

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[blueskies]

Because if it goes down for 2 days you eventually won't get any snmp data from your switch?

1.) Why would people use a lease time of under 1 or 2 days for static infrastructure? (or 7 days even)
2.) Do DHCP failures for more than 24 hours fit into your uptime requirements?

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[blueskies]

Longer lease times, perhaps?

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[exes]

There are a lot of ways to do it. If it involves a DHCP server and vital infrastructure, then anyway you put it seems stupid to me. I log into my switches for troubleshooting, configuration changes, etc... we have about 350 or so. So no, not for the ever so important SNMP data.

Re:you track your IP addresses?

[spectre_240sx]

Did you read your own post? The IP address would be in two potentially authoritative places in this case. The device and the DHCP server. That sounds like a recipe for mistakes to me. Someone who didn't already have knowledge of that environment would have a real hard time figuring out what how things were set up.

Open-Audit

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.open-audit.org/

Does just fine for me.

Re:Open-AudIT

[jon3k]

We run Open-AudiT here as well, it's actually pretty awesome. Yes, it will run on Linux.

God help me

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I have a crap excel spreadsheet I inherited from my predecessor.
If I ever have time I have been thinking about a database backend with a web frontend.

Re:God help me

[Red Flayer]

God help you?

You've got an excel spreadsheet? You're a lucky bastard.

I have a customized Peoplesoft implementation for asset tracking, designed by three blind goatherds, one of whom also had leprosy (I may be exaggerating a bit. I suspect it was more like twenty, ~since having more people design a system is always a good idea~).

Seriously... Search for asset. Find asset. Enable correct history mode. Click through four forms to get to custodian details. Update custodian details. Run asset update process. Check process monitor for error messages. Resolve errors. Rerun update process. And that's a simple change.

Heaven/Hell forbid there was any issue with the Tag # or Serial # assigned to an asset.

Hell hath no torment like a Peoplesoft implementation used for something it has no business being used for.

Re:God help me

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I'll send you a copy. That way there will be two of us using it and that is enough people to start a support group.
The first step is to admit you have a problem.
I forget steps 2 through 11, but I am sure:
12. Profit.

OpenNMS

[spun]

It's open source, it's free, it's a complete network management system, and you can import existing asset information as well as populate through network discovery. We use it here at the New Mexico Child Youth and Family Development Department, with 53 offices, 2500 workstations, and 80 servers.

http://opennms.org/

Re:OpenNMS

[Z00L00K]

I can agree that OpenNMS is a good choice. It contains most of the features you want for IT administration.

The only disadvantage I have discovered with OpenNMS is that it is a bit heavy on resources, so I would recommend a dedicated server for the monitoring.

Re:OpenNMS

[Tolkien]

I can see why a name like that would require management, aren't children youth?

Re:OpenNMS

[marklee713]

Thanks for the mention. The article itself shows that you put a great deal of care into your work it training Thanks for sharing all these links and informative stuff.

Re:OpenNMS

[Ironica]

"Youth" usually refers to people who haven't reached the age of majority, but are in many respects taking on adult roles.

See how far you get calling a program for adolescents a "Child..." anything.

Do you want it to be open source or not?

[GPLDAN]

Open Source use OpenNMS: http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Main_Page

Want commercial software?: Solarwinds Orion with IP Monitor.

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[spun]

Haha, beat you to it by mere seconds. OpenNMS in the hizzouse! :)

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[gandhi_2]

4 digit uid...

in the hizzouse!

Daaaaaaad! That's embaaaaaaaaaaaarasing!

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[maxume]

Your erudite sig demonstrates your strong preference for decorum.

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[inKubus]

We just purchased LanREV which has been pretty good. We have a ton of Macs and this is the only one I could find that could do Macs and PCs (and they have a Linux client coming soon). It has a lot of stuff for handling special cases (such as Adobe software, etc) which makes it worth the money. With OpenNMS you're going to spend a lot of time hacking since there's a lot of different software installers out there, plus the client will have to be deployed manually or you have to write or find a deployer. With LanRev, it just scans the LAN and logs into the Macs via SSH and downloads itself; Windows it does the equivalent (C$ or whatever).

We were doing software inventory manually which was getting tedious. Our licenses move around a bit, you see. It also has a lot of automation, like moving licenses around, provisioning new computers, etc. It even has an internet server so your laptops can check in when out on the road. Not sure on the price, I think around $20-30/client install and $10/year which is not bad. If it had a linux server and client I would be set; their sales engineer said they would have Linux client by the end of the year (RHEL/CentOS and SUSE).. We add a license to the cost of each new box and no one even notices, except when accounting asks for an inventory and I just clickity-clickity-print.

Also, it exports inventory to a number of helpdesk packages (WebHelpDesk, for one) so you can keep that updated for your helpdesk people so they can track issues by device..

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[jra]

And his 4-digit number is even lower than mine. :-)

Yes, I prefer open source, though I guess that wasn't necessarily discoverable from the "I'd like to be able to hack on it" comment.

I hadn't realized OpenNMS did that much inventoryish work; a dedicated server is no problem. I'll add that to my list.

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[spun]

It's a quote from MC Hawking's song, "Fuck the Creationists." Very funny stuff. "You down with entropy? Yeah you know me!"

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[spun]

Look, we old folks may seem 'wiggity-wack' to you young whippersnappers, but let me assure you, we are dope, fresh and fly.

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[maxume]

I figured the sarcasm in the post took the edge off of the judgmentalism.

Re:Do you want it to be open source or not?

[spun]

Oh, I don't really care about the judgmentalism, or any other form of mentalism, for that matter. I just like MC Hawking.

Landesk

[deAtog]

Landesk is one such solution.. Unless of course you need something to monitor software installed on non-Windows machines...

Re:Landesk

[afidel]

Landesk has Mac and Linux clients, which is one of the big things that makes it stand out in it's market segment.

Re:Landesk

[snowblind]

Unix as well...

Re:Landesk

[ctmurray]

We have Landesk on our PC's at work. I never knew what it was for. You learn quite a bit from slashdot.

http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/

[polgair]

This has clients for mac, linux, windows. You can pool each device for hardware/software configs. You can do patches through them. It can do network devices as well. And it's open source :)

Re:http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/

[hguorbray]

We are using both ocsinventory and openNMS and they both seem to have their advantages

OCS seems to be superior for pure inventory -ie CPUs, RAM, NIC, and HW and has a cleaner interface.

NMS has more active agent-based monitoring (extensible via SNMP) and is really good at tracking connectivity/downtime by NIC and also network stats such as packet stats over time, etc. and has decent time sequence graphs out of the box.

they are both open source and seem to have their different strengths, so try 'em both out and see what works

There may be more functional overlap than what I have indicated above, but this is based on the way we have used them

-I'm just sayin'

Re:http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/

[jp10558]

GLPI is an invaluable add on to OCSNG IMO. Inventory is somewhat separate from Monitoring IMO - I don't necessarily want to monitor every desktop, but I do want to know where it is... We use Zenoss Core for Monitoring "stuff", and it works quite well once you learn how to configure it. I suppose that's true for everything though.

Roll your own...

[Fallen Kell]

We finally made our own. We created a mysql database and table schema storing the hardware information along with the schema for locations in the facility (typically cubicles, offices, labs, and server rooms). Wrote up a website using PHP with proper forms to insert new hardware, move hardware from one location to another, or remove hardware, and search functions to find hardware. We went a little further as well by getting floor and building plans and made clickable image maps for all the locations so that you can just browse to the building/floor/cubicle, see what is in there already, and add new stuff or move existing stuff etc., as well as have a way to highlight the location of a particular piece of hardware if you looked for it based on hostname, etc.

It really isn't that hard to do. And if you setup your database tables and schema correctly so that you can easily expand for new hardware types, buildings/locations, it isn't too hard to maintain. The hardest thing that we deal with is when we move into a new building and we have to generate the floor map, but it doesn't usually take more then a few hours at most.

Re:Roll your own...

[UltimApe]

I'm actually doing a similar thing right now, coding it up in perl. How big is your database's schema? How long did such an endeavor take you?

Re:Roll your own...

[Fallen Kell]

Took a couple weeks to hash out the database schema. Doing "what if", scenarios and the like to try and take into account future needs. We did a pretty darn good job since it has lasted 10 years now with only very minor changes to the database (adding a field here or there for other data that we felt was pertinent). The main idea is to make sure that it is robust in the sense that anything which could grow or change in the future is in its own table and you simply have a foreign key to easily get the values. Another big deal is to remove as much human input as possible, doing things like pull-down menus or choose from things so that you don't have something like "Sun", "Sun Microsystems", "SunMicro", "sun", "SUn Microsystmes" in a field...

As I said with ours, since we have the building/floor maps, we do not let you physically type in a location, you have to click on the location from the maps. Again, this removes the chances of someone entering strange data. We do as much pattern matching/validity testing as we can do on the data to make sure it is correct, and have a verification page before data is actually input or changed in the database (with highlighting exactly what is changing). It also keeps a "history" of the hardware, along with who updated the data and when. It sounds a lot more involved then it is. A good schema for the database can easily take care of all these things. History is simply a table that is 3 fields, "id", "item_id", and "value", with "id" and auto increment primary key, item_id a foreign key which corresponds to the particular item, and value a text blob which stores HTML formatted text output of the fields that were changed, the old values, the new values, the date, and by whom. The information that gets placed in that is handled by the PHP webpage.

I think we have something like 6-7 tables in our schema. Separating anything that we wanted to keep uniform into its own table which we have an administration front end to modify or add to those tables (things like manufacturers, models, etc). Again the idea is to make as little as possible be up to the human inputting the data so that the data will be consistent which will allow you to actually search for things and be sure that you find all of them, and not miss something because someone made a typo when entering the manufacturer name.

It took probably 4 months from soup to nuts. But at the time, we had to compile everything from source code (something like a LAMP server wasn't really there yet, and you had to compile mysql, apache, and PHP to get them all to work properly back then). Now its a push of a button and it is basically done. In fact we had to compile the compilers before we could compile the LAMP software. A lot has changed in the last 10 years...

Re:Roll your own...

[ZERO1ZERO]

We went a little further as well by getting floor and building plans and made clickable image maps for all the locations so that you can just browse to the building/floor/cubicle, see what is in there already, and add new stuff or move existing stuff etc

This is very interesting I had this idea the other week as getting everything into these systems can be no problem, but actually managing stuff once it's in there and updating it can be a bitch.
But graphically just mirroring what has been done an the floor seems like a nice solution, and solves many things at once.
Did you use image maps, and some image magick tiling? Or some mad table/grid coordinate system? Or save CSS javascript drag and drop style thing?

Re:Roll your own...

[Anonymous Coward]

HMM

i HAVE been trying to build one for telecom assets in mapinfo with no success
Particularly how do you migrate floor plans in pdf format to mapinfo
can you create a model?

ANy help would be appreciated thanks

Re:Roll your own...

[Spyder]

Have you looked at releasing your in house app?

Re:Roll your own...

[m3741]

I'm also doing something similar. Would you be gracious enough to post your DB schema somewhere?

Re:Roll your own...

[UltimApe]

That sounds similar to how I'm going about it. Granted I don't have to compile anything by hand, but being my first serious programming project, I've ran into a Couple snafus here and there that were a pain, but and designing the schema did take a lot of work. I haven't implemented a history, but it sounds like a good/easier feature to add in.

I ended up going with straight up perl, cgi.pm, and dbi.pm, so the code is a little more low level that it probably should be, but it works out well for the website design. the hardest part is creating the pipelines behind the scene to handle variable inputs from the pages. I've got all the pages templated out into seperate files and loaded into the cgi on the fly, so that my preddessesors will most likely only have to edit those, and not the schema etc.

I've been doing a lot of "select unique x from y" to populate drop downs... although the first option is always [unspecified], and the second is *add new*... which using JavaScript, rewrites the field as a text entry. on selecting the drop down, it ajaxicly populates the next field with the related subset. - this is useful for site/building/room schema we've got going on, as I don't want people to errorently attribute a room that doesn't exist.

I'm more focusing on ease of use, the harder it is for the user to do, the less likely they'll do it. Being a college, a lot of the users are work-study, and only work for a few hours each week between classes. the simpler the better.

Re:Roll your own...

[totally bogus dude]

I put together something similar with Perl. The main feature which you haven't mentioned (so possibly you haven't thought of implementing it) is that it tracks users in real-time and shows them on the map. This is just done with a simple VB script that's run by the login script, which posts its info to a CGI every 5 minutes (basic stuff like the user that's logged on, IP and MAC addresses, computer name, serial number).

A separate process polls the switches via SNMP for the MAC address tables, which tells us which MAC address is visible on which switchport. Then there's a table used to map the switchports to the tie cable connected to that port, and then the tie cable to a physical outlet number on the floor, and then finally to a location on the map.

The result is a simple web page our helpdesk guys can go to, type in a username, and see a map showing where that particular user is.

We have a completely separate system (Infra Enterprise) for actually tracking assets so there's no tie-in there, but it could potentially be used to at least track the physical location of PCs. Monitors are always a pain though.

40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[Russ1642]

Government operation?

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[Anonymous Coward]

yes you are

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[groslyunderpaid]

lol sounds funny. Except I just left a company with 39 servers, 90 desktops, and 15 laptops. Insurance Industry.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[Falconhell]

I cannot understand why people have so many damn servers. You have almost a server for every 2 machines.

  In my systems I have 4 servers for 200 machines. Why so many?

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[groslyunderpaid]

At my previous post, the Sys Admin was a firm believer in keeping all software separate from each other, and high redundancy.

2 domain controllers for the lan, 2 domain controllers for the agent extranet, 1 for voicemail, 1 for ACD, 1 for call reporting, 2 for database, 1 for applications, 1 for documents, 1 for mail, 1 for web applications, 1 for blackberry, 1 for building security, 1 for PBX administration, jesus I'm already tired of doing this list.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[anotherncbeachbum]

In inherited a similar setup. Moved most of everything to VMWare. Some of the stuff made no sense. Our PBX has a serial interface. Rather than keep a laptop in the server room to use for management he setup a brand new desktop over in the corner dedicated to managing the PBX. The entire software needed to manage it is maybe 1.5mb....yet it sat on a Dell Opti 745 with 2gb of memory, etc. In the last 6 months they had 2 phone changes....all that box did. I put a win xp image up on vm ware, the phone admins can connect in when needed to use it.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[Pvt_Ryan]

haha.

When I started my job we had 2 servers for every 1 employee. Never mind the desktop to employee ratio.

Thankfully I have now reduced that to about 4 employees per server.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[jon3k]

Ask Google. They've only got 20,000 employees but estimates put the number of servers well into the 6 figure range.

It really depends on the business model, specifically if you're offering services on the Internet, you've probably got a small administrative staff managing a huge number of servers. Or what about companies with big render farms?

Here we have about 80 servers (~60 physical, the rest virtualized) and about 600-700 workstations. We also have over 6,000 employees.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[spectre_240sx]

Where I work it's a case of just having a ton of applications to support. That plus we're using Citrix which adds a number of servers there. We also have a DR site that replicates some of our core servers.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[Ironica]

Am I the only one who has seen the same level of incompetance in the private sector?

In the private sector, you don't have nearly the burden to justify purchases and performance, so you're a lot more likely to have really wasteful implementations perpetuated endlessly.

So, for my part, I've seen a lot MORE incompetence in the private sector.

Re:40 Servers, 100 Workstations

[WuphonsReach]

It all depends on the industry that you're in.

Our server/user ratio is up around 1:2.5 right now.

Of course, you can blame some of that on cost-cutting on the employee side, but we've also chopped servers out of the equation in the past 2 years.

And the ratio gets even worse once we start adding in virtualized servers.

(On the upside, we do at least do virtualization now.)

GLPI

[ZERO1ZERO]

http://www.glpi-project.org/?lang=en

This might be the sort of thing, coupled with the OCNS agent it'll scan your network and log all the data into a myql database. Ticket system which allows users to report stuff attached to an asset, reporting, contracts, and stuff. Worth a look.

Re:GLPI

[ZERO1ZERO]

yeah - this : http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1310515&cid=28775629

Re:GLPI

[Anonymous Coward]

2nd the GLPI recommendation. It can be integrated with this product to do automated inventory reporting:
http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/

It collects all important data and syncs it to the GLPI system. We put together a JumpBox for GLPI with OCS pre-integrated. It's a special virtual machine that runs on every major type of virtualization and allows you to get started with it quickly. That can be found here: http://www.jumpbox.com/app/glpi

Re:GLPI

[Anonymous Coward]

Also integrates well with Microsoft Active Directory. I'm building GLPI out for 30 Facilities in North America with will encompass thousands of PC's; currently two fully integrated, and 5 others at a useful state. OCS coupled with GLPI makes inventory automatic. I set it up so that OCS-NG scanner is installed via Group Policy when computer joins domain.

Down side; GLPI is easy to install, but harder to setup I've changed config options at least three times to get where I'm at.

I would do it all again, but there might be other options with better features.

http://www.glpi-project.org/?lang=en

This might be the sort of thing, coupled with the OCNS agent it'll scan your network and log all the data into a myql database. Ticket system which allows users to report stuff attached to an asset, reporting, contracts, and stuff. Worth a look.

Re:GLPI

[ZERO1ZERO]

I would say the same. Forgot to mention the Active directory integration which works nicely with the LDAP etc. I too would consider alternatives if doing it again, but GLPI works, but can be a bitch to setup.

Configuration Management DataBase

[Colin Smith]

There must be a million of them. Yeah, you can get autodiscovery as well.

Google is your friend.
 

Re:Configuration Management DataBase

[jra]

Google doesn't really know *what actual users think of the program*, generally, which I thought it was obvious was the point.

IE: "LMGTFY" isn't a particularly helpful response.

Re:Configuration Management DataBase

[Ironica]

There must be a million of them.

I'll bet that's EXACTLY why the OP is asking for recs.

Re:Configuration Management DataBase

[jra]

It was indeed.

And yes, I do.

OCS

[vinn]

We use OCS and really like it: http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/ It's one of those things that tends to just work well. In fact, our version is about 2 years old now and we haven't had a need to upgrade it at all because it's just doing what it need to do.

Re:OCS

[IMightB]

Yeah I like OCS Inventory + GLPI, for network monitoring I use Nagios, though I'm seriously considering checking out OpenNMS to replace my Nagios 2.9 installation.

Re:OCS

[mrmagos]

If you're already using Nagios, migration to Opsview is extremely smooth.

Re:OCS

[jp10558]

We use OCSNG + GLPI for inventory, though for network monitoring I had decided to go with Zenoss Core over Nagios as I just didn't understand how to set Nagios up. OpenNMS does look interesting though.

To the toolboxes...

[f8l_0e]

who keep tagging stories like these and especially 'Ask Slashdot' submissions with the domyjobforme tag, please STFU. Quite often, the submitter has done extensive research on the matter and shared his or her observations and is looking for people to share their ideas or experiences. Your attitude does not fit in with the open source spirit that the readers of Slashdot enjoy being a part of. If done as a joke, it is no longer funny.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[the_weasel]

Amen. Unfortunately there will always be elitist arses who think that just because they know a little bit about some obscure topic, anyone who doesn't is a lazy slacker. I don't have any need for asset tracking of this nature at the moment, but i found the topic interesting, and learned something from the few comments that have appeared so far. The politics and YRO topics bore me to tears. These topics are why I still bother to visit this site.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Galestar]

The submitter should try a forum, this is a news site.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Anonymous Coward]

The submitter should try a forum, this is a news site.

Dear Slashdot Forum,

you're never going to believe this, but every word of it is true.

Last Tuesday, me and my network inventory specialist, I'll call her Sally, were managing a little inventory, if you get my drift, when our assistant IT admin Veronica walked in unannounced. Well, from there things got a little freaky....to be continued....

Re:To the toolboxes...

[EvanED]

So you want the "Ask Slashdot" section dropped entirely? After all, none of them are really news.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't, it's CmdrTaco's blog, and last time I checked Taco could put whatever the fuck he likes on it. If it is a pure news site, why do you think it has an 'Ask Slashdot' section? Fucking plebeian.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Archangel Michael]

Your attitude does not fit in with the open source spirit that the readers of Slashdot enjoy being a part of.

Yes it does! NOW STFU RTFM N00b

Re:To the toolboxes...

[mcrbids]

It's easy to to tag "domyjobforme" because so many of the "Ask Slashdot" stories are just awful. There was one a day or so ago which was something like "I take my laptop places, and it might get stolen, how do I encrypt a disk with Windows XP" which could have been answered in .08 seconds a la Google. There was a clear winner that had high ratings, was open source, etc.

No, I'm not the tagging culprit that you speak of, but so often, you just think: WTF?

I'll agree with you on this point: sometimes there are so many options that it takes significant research to find something decent - the signal/noise ratio gets so low that it's just painful. This article is one of those, and even some of the comments don't provide all that much help, one of these could be summarized: "I made my own. It was easy because I'm l337. You can't have a copy".

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious. That's the open source spirit I recall so fondly. When we could be curmudgeons freely, without some young idealist wasting our time.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Red Flayer]

I welcome these "obvious" Ask Slashdot articles. They are what enables me to convince my employer that slashdot is a work resource that needs to be whitelisted.

Not really... but in case I hear those dreaded words ("What is slashdot.org") come review time... I'll have some defensive ammunition.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[onkelonkel]

There is a right way and a wrong way to ask for help in an open source forum.

Wrong way..

Q. How do I get my HP all-in-one printer to work in Red Hat?
A. STFU Noob. RTFM.....

Right Way..

Q. Red Hat Sucks. It won't even print to my HP all-in one printer. I'm going to install Windows XP. At least it works.
A. Oh my god, don't do that. All you need to do is edit foobar.print.cfg and change edrtflg$ = 0 ...PM me if you need any more help...

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Sir_Lewk]

Your attitude does not fit in with the open source spirit

Wait, what does software licensing have to do with getting annoyed at gits who don't know their job?

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Bigjeff5]

Or he could try the Ask Slashdot section.

Oh wait...

P.S.: Slashdot is not really a news site. It looks like it is, but it isn't. It's a news aggregation site who'd primary "feature" is the opinions of fellow slashdotters. Most news sites don't recieve or want comments on their stories. Slashdot does, and the entire site is built around facilitating that. Go check out a slashdot story sometime to see what I mean. There will be a 200 word summary post and 150 comments, most of them centered on three or four discussions. That's Slashdot's added value to the news they serve. Hell, half the time the news here is stone cold, broke out days weeks or months before Slashdot got ahold of it, but the discussions make it interesting.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Tolkien]

+1 Insightful (I have mod points, but I already posted and you're already at 5). :)

Re:To the toolboxes...

[L4t3r4lu5]

You must be an op in #linuxsupport.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use it for news reading, you insensitive clod!!

Re:To the toolboxes...

[counterplex]

As an actual lazy slacker even I put in a little bit of work before asking my peers for help. That way I can maximize the benefit I get from asking my peers by making sure they don't give me the same answer I could get frmo Google. That just makes good sense. It also helps me determine who else is a lazy slacker :)

Re:To the toolboxes...

[jra]

You're welcome. :-)

In fact, I'm getting a lot of useful answers out of the responses (even if some of them amount to "please! Add me to your block list! :-).

And, like you, it does make "reading Slashdot" a more defensible addition to my daily task list.

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Archangel Michael]

Nope, I'm a disciple of the BOFH. I bow down in awe of his teachings!

Re:To the toolboxes...

[Icegryphon]

Too true, Too true.

Open-AudIT

[munwin99]

http://www.open-audit.org/ Try it - GPL Licensed. Version 2 coming soon. Rewritten from scratch, using 10 years worth of network inventory and open source knowledge. OAv2 interface video http://www.open-audit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3068

Belarc Advisor

[Anonymous Coward]

B A to make a paper trail. OK, I work with a bunch of CPAs, and the hundred or so machines you have make this only arduous, not impossible.

Besides, it gives a detailed accounting of the types and branding of network, audio, video, and other chips on the motherboard. I took delivery of a dozen supposedly identical Acer computers, and not a single one could accept a Macrium backup from another there was so much variability. Virtual machines, yech.

But you do need to keep track of license numbers, by hook or crook. This blunt axe will do it.

Open-AudIT

[bman1978]

Open-AudIT is pretty good for cross platform but it doesn't cover all of your requirements. I'm yet to find anything that is an IP database plus complete system inventory. Open-AudIT is very good at the inventory side. I run it in Windows since I was trying to replace TrackIT. There's a Linux agent and it'd be pretty easy to customize it for other OSes. It does licensing as well. Want to know how many computers have Office and what version? Who has outdated Antivirus? It even gives you license keys used. Getting it up and running with XAMPP for Windows is quick for testing. I haven't used it as much on the server side. We use IBM Director for that.

Asset Tracker for RT a toolkit?

[falzbro]

Your description of AT is completely off. I'm an active user of RT and Asset Tracker (AT). It's not a toolkit at all, it's a clean modification that adds an 'Assets' link in the nav bar where you hold assets. From there you create and manage custom fields and custom field values from within the standard locations of RT. At no point must you know a URL to do anything in RT or AT. There are simple or complex searches, linking assets to others (depends on, requires, etc) is simply typing a few letters into a box to search on, then choose the appropriate action from a dropdown box.

Unfortunately there have been no releases of AT in a while, but it still cleanly applies even to the latest version of RT. It does have a new home for its code on google code and is getting updates, just not a new release for a few years.

Re:Asset Tracker for RT a toolkit?

[natxo asenjo]

My point exactly. Too bad I do not have mod points :)

Asset Tracker is a great project. Yes, it is a bit of a 'pain' to set up, but so is any asset tracking software. At work we have had a consultant at least 3 weeks working intensively with one of our team to get another solution installed. That is 3 weeks consultant's salary plus 3 weeks salary of one of the team. The other solution sucks, but hey, it costs a lot of money and it is 'supported'.

Asset Tracker lets you build your solution just like you have to do with other packages. But it costs you nothing if you do it yourself. If you already have a working knowlegde of how Request Tracker works, it should not cost you a lot of time to have it working.

I am writing some documentation on how to install Asset Tracker and configure it. It will be released shortly, but I have no fixed deadlines (this is on my own time).

LanSweeper

[Anonymous Coward]

Network stats plus metrics (OS, CPU, RAM) for every machine you run the client on.

Re:lansweeper

[davidla]

This is something we implemented around here, but won't be used long because our new policy management software will provide the same function. A few things, though : 1) The agent isn't really considered an agent. It loads briefly (I've never seen it run for more than a second) and immediately terminates. All it does is tell the server "I'm here, scan me" 2) Lansweeper has a paid-for Premium version. It includes several tools, and more recently the ability to scan more than one domain (this use to be a free feature). One of the tools enables active scanning (no more 'agent'). 3) You need a Windows domain to use it. 4) If you know SQL/databases and web programming, it's fairly easy to customize.

I'd avoid Kbox

[Pvt_Ryan]

we use it and to say I am less than impressed would be an understatement. It is slow, goes offline for an hour each day and isn't overly cheap.

Sounds like you want LAN Desk

[vertinox]

But expect to pay a pretty penny for it.

The application does more than remote control system, it can also do inventory scans of software and hardware.

Beyond that you got me...

Nagios?

[Darth_brooks]

Nagios? For asset tracking? "I was trying to check my e-mail using using apache, and it just wasn't living up to my expectations at all...." I guess when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

http://www.open-audit.org/ does a nice job of tracking on the windows side. Set up xampp, unzip the contents of the openaudit zip file into the htdocs directory, visit the side, move on with your life. Open Audit as a project is a little hackish and informal for my tastes, but it does pass the JFW (just fucking works) test. Tracks assets, installed software, license keys. It's just a PHP frontend for WMI results, so if WMI is acting funny, then open audit will be funny too. I also doubt it'll do much for network device inventory other than identifying approximately what the device is. (Printers show up ok, I doubt switches or routers will appear as anything other than "other".)

My suggestion for integrating Nagios would be to set an action URL for each of your hosts that in turn points to the Open Audit page for that particular host, unless you're already using the action URL for PNP (and if you're not, you should be for some of your hosts.)

Re:Nagios?

[Darth_brooks]

forgot to mention, if you've got linux boxes, you can do inventory for those devices using the Hardware Abstraction Layer and an easily Cron'd script.

Re:Nagios?

[Techman83]

2nd for Open Audit. It passes the JFW test rather well. Version 1 looks a little primative, but it does the job well. Version 2 is looking very promising, most of the extra functionality requested out of V1 is coming in V2. Works with AD using LDAP, get waranty info at the click of a mouse for the bigger brands (dell, Ibm etc). Support is pretty impressive and the Lead developer does cruise the forums.

Does windows/linux (vb script and bash script respectively), random devices (using nmap) etc. Run it at work, scan 100+ user machines, 30 odd servers (mixture of Linux/Windows). Good for shutting up users who whinge about slow machines and have known programs that cause problems installed on their work machines.

Re:Nagios?

[jra]

So, no, I'm not trying to use Nagios for inventory; merely pointing out that I already use it for monitoring, so integrated inventory/monitor software needs to be enough better to make ditching it worthwhile.

If you need the hardware actually inventoried...

[Associate]

I need a job. Inventory is my background.

Why the hell would you prefer Perl and C over Java

[Dr_Barnowl]

Java is a walk in the park compared to these two to maintain...

Perl

[Krneki]

I cannot comment on this specific issue, but I use Perl to do all the repetitive queries and sort them into a file.
The file is then read by IIS and can be seen by typing http://servername/ or just servername in the browser.
IIS is setup to display list.txt by default.

Few Suggestions / Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a comparison of a few products:

http://emco-network-inventory.en.softonic.com/compare/vnc,ultravnc,mikrotik-com

PHP + MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

For stuff like this where you want your own fields etc, really this is the best way. PHP and MySQL are extremely easy to pick up as you go along plus there isn't a lot of bloat involved and you can update it from where ever you may be at the time.

I tracked 300 PCs and all software

[mschuyler]

using a simple Access database for many years. One table for hardware, one for software, tied together. Every time I'd get a group of licenses for software I'd bang them in there, then gradually assign the software to machines. The software table had fields to invoice numbers and dates, so I could always prove, in an instant, that any given copy was legit.

The commercial stuff, especially for your size, is really overkill. I tried some over the years and they were just too complex for what is a fairly simple task.

for Data Centre kit

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Racktables. It s a nice system that allows you to lay out your racks, specify server types, interconnects, etc, and it has automated SNMP discovery for certain types of hardware. It could be better, but it does the job nicely for server racks. You could put your workstations into it, but it's less suited for that.

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

We use spiceworks.

Re:Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 for Spiceworks, tracks anything with an IP. No client side install needed.

Back in my MS days....

[gblfxt]

We used MS Access and some scanners. I was in the TSG (Trade Show Group) division, and we had a lot of morons there. We processed hundreds of systems a day, and it seemed to work decent for that environment.

GLPI

[The Angry Mick]

We've been using GLPI for several years now. It's web-based, customizable to a fair degree, and free.

Can be found here.

Kwok and Open-AudIT

[Snowhare]

I have found Open-AudIT to be a good tool for tracking the 'soft' side of the house with minimal pain while
Kwok Information Server was a better tool for tracking 'hard' assets. Both are open source.

What about Brage?

[ghstridr]

Anybody been using it?

HP tooling.

[Anonymous Coward]

We use HP products here, not cheap though..

HP DDMi (Discovery and Dependency Mapping - Inventory), and HP uCMDB (DDMA) as the UCMDB.. The former just creates an inventory of all the network devices along with software (+ fingerprinting detection), the later gives you a topographical view of the network and shows you how the configuration items are related (for example, you can tell that this particular oracle server is used by X appservers, and by these N apps).

I-Doit

[Noctris]

We use I-Doit. It's is intended as an itil library but they you can easily just use the asset management part. All the objects you name can be entered and interconnected (for example: interface eth0 on workstation A is connected through cable B with switch C on interface D of that switch.. And since it integrates with nagios (have not used that functionlity but many have) AND is standalone, i think it can fit your needs

http://www.i-doit.org/

It's a nice tool

Might be overkill but...

[AdamWeeden]

To do the same thing (and much more) in my position I use Symantec's Altiris product.

Re:Might be overkill but...

[Bigjeff5]

Oh god, not Altiris!

My company, a huge multinational company, recently switched to Altiris for inventory tracking, license management, and software delivery.

From what I can tell, on a global network with somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 machines, it's ok for inventory, great for controling licenses, and terrible at software delivery.

Using Altiris it takes upwards of ten times longer to install applications that reside on the same servers that our old in-house scripting team used. Servers didn't move, same applications, 10 times longer to install. Setting up an old user with a new machine can now take hours instead of a few minutes (I'm talking after the build up and profile transfer).

The problem may have been with the implimentation for our particular situation, the concept and feature list I think are brillient. That doesn't change the fact that the word Altiris makes me shudder involuntarily now.

Lucky for me, I moved to a different group and get to manage my own, separate internal network of about 400 machines.

Re:Might be overkill but...

[Anonymous Coward]

My company was bought by a Global Corp that uses Altiris, and frankly, I am not pleased with either of those tasks, Inventory or Software delivery.

We have 200+ computers here, and I know that Altiris is overkill in some ways.

God help you if the Notification Server goes down... All imaging and software deployment comes to screeching halt.

Not a Good thing.

shameless self-promotion

[jakepaulus]

We have had/do have similar issues and have not found a single solution. For windows host inventory, we're utilizing Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager (previously we were using System Management Server) For network device inventory (managed routers and switches) we take a two-fold approach: Rancid for configuration (and therefor inventory) and NeDi for network discovery and inventory. For IP address Management we tried a few apps (phpIP and IPPlan) but I found issues with both...so i wrote my own and we use it now: Collate:Network. I had written something similar to Collate:Network for hardware/software/user-assignment management called Collate:Inventory but it never caught on so it mostly sits idle now waiting for someone to ask me to get off my butt and start adding new features. To a certain extend I think this mish-mash of tools works well for us. Each tool is good at what it does (at least the ones I work with are...i don't really use the Microsoft tools personally) and so we usually get what we want out of them. The problem we run into is that there are so many tools to manage that they sometimes don't get the attention they need to stay up-to-date on our environment...though i don't know if a single monolithic tool is the answer either.

Re:Why the hell would you prefer Perl and C over J

[Anonymous Coward]

so you never tried, right?

Simplest solution

[DoofusOfDeath]

eBay

I might get stoned for this. How About Novell ZAM

[calcutta001]

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/assetmanagement/

Features

Complete View of IT Assets
software license compliance
Elimination of manual tracking and inventory gathering
Change notification
custom reporting
Integrated Management
Automated discovery
Detailed software and hardware inventory
Software usage tracking
Contract management

Sometimes no good FOSS solution available.

[uslurper]

Thanks for asking.. i am in a very similar situation. So far i have not found any free / open-source product that works as well as LogInventory, but for some reason the purchase on the credit card was not working. That was dissapointing. I'm OK with puchasing software that just fucking works rather than tinkering around with a free solution that doesnt.
The whole 'install on a web server' thing bugs me for things that should be desktop apps.
Some apps claimed to be free but then wanted you to sign up for services (WAAAY EXPENSIVE SERVICES)
That pissed me off.

I will have to check out GLPI or open-Audit and Kwok as suggested.. I will respond back after.

Re:Sometimes no good FOSS solution available.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already moderated, so this'll be anonymous... A year or 2 ago we purchased a product called RTO which wasn't bad at first, but each new release seems to suck more and more. The UI is absoluely horrendous. I really like loginventory, I implemented a 20 user free version at a non profit that I do volunteer work for. Very nice. I was about to beg for budget (not very likely) to get it, but thought to myself "RT3, Nagios, Snort, MailScanner, and Spam Assassin are all VERY good, and free, there must be a good FOSS inventory product out there. I just finished installing openaudIT this morning, and I'm very impressed. Does software very well (out main need) and hardware is everything we need as well. The web, php and SQL all runs on our Linux server, and the vbscripts that do wmi queries run on a windows box. So far, I think it's a winner.

Re:Sometimes no good FOSS solution available.

[RichiH]

The whole 'install on a desktop' thing bugs me for things that should be server apps.

I guess it depends on how you work (and how many people work on it). I for one am glad about choice :)

CMDB, i-doit

[omar_armas]

Check http://www.i-doit.org/, it works very well for me and is CMDB compatible. Omar

Re:I might get stoned for this. How About Novell Z

[Anonymous Coward]

Our School just installed the new Zenworks. It's done the job well so far.

I rolled my own

[gestalt_n_pepper]

It's a command line utility written in .net that cranks out system information into a comma delimited file on a shared directory on each machine. Have a batch file that copies the output to a single directory on my machine and merges the lot. I suppose I could tweak it to update an sql database and put together a nice front-end for others, but for my teeny 100 system kingdom, it's sufficient. Free too, since I wrote the thing.

Re:I rolled my own

[mrzaph0d]

heh. you work for symantec? that's how SAV works...

Re:I rolled my own

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. No, I work at software company that makes seismic analysis and visualization software. I'm a test automation engineer/architect. The IT-ish stuff is just something I had to do when the budget got tight and we weren't allowed to use anything we hadn't compiled personally. Long time ago, after the dot-com crash. I ended up writing dozens of little gizmos like that.

Write your own

[HomelessInLaJolla]

If your employer does not allow you to spend the time learning how to design your own system, if the management is so incompetent that they do not have faith in the down the road benefits of such an important long term commitment, then you do not want to work for them. Period. No excuses. You should walk out the door this very moment.

OpenNMS

[scarolan]

OpenNMS has fields for serial number, location, asset number, etc. etc.

Or if your hardware is all HP-branded you can use their free HP SIM software. We managed to get HP SIM to work with dell machines too, by loading up a custom SNMP MIB.

TrackIt!

[twistah]

TrackIt! seems to be very popular with my clients, but it is a commercial tool and may be overkill for your needs. Still, it may be worth a look.

Re:TrackIt!

[Anonymous Coward]

We used this at the company I worked at and it was a wonderful tool. Plus it was also nice if you wanted to keep track of your IT issues within the company.

Re:TrackIt!

[Anonymous Coward]

We use that where I work too, and we call it CrapIt for multiple reasons.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiceworks
http://www.spiceworks.com/
works for us...

OCS Inventory

[ghodder]

I've been running OCS Inventory for about 4yrs now to track serial numbers of monitors, desktops and servers as well as hardware specs, installed software, Windows CD key, IP, username, etc.

Best part imo is you just install a small agent on each PC or server and it automates the data collection at configurable intervals. The back end is written in perl but uses PHP for management and MySQL for storage. It includes some general reports and a search function but I wrote a basic PHP script to allow me to search the database for a username and return the associated PC name so I can quickly VNC into users PCs when they call for help.

It can also integrate with GLPI to allow fine-grained tracking of printers, support tickets, repair history, consumables stock-on-hand, estimates of TCO, etc.

http://ocsinventory-ng.org/

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

spiceworks.com ...nuff said.

OpenNetAdmin IPAM + plugins

[hornet136]

I'd suggest http://opennetadmin.com/ It is primarily an IPAM solution but also has plugins that allow you to track many asset related items. Things like Rack location, puppet "facts", and custom attributes all allow you to track and configure your environment. It features a nice AJAX enabled web front end as well as a full CLI interface as well for scripting/batch etc. More integrations to various tools like nagios, cacti, nmap, nessus, puppet, etc are in the works. Hope that helps.

Mod me down! Sharepoint!

[citylivin]

Surely i will be modded down for suggesting a microsoft solution, but your problem is pretty simple to solve with a sharepoint server. Its free (there is a pay version as well), and if you have office and don't mind using IE, it integrates nicely. Plays OK with firefox, just cant do some advanced editing (spreadsheet view, some imports). Sharepoint is a bitch sometimes as its a microsoft product and thus designed badly, but there is certainly alot of support out there in the form of plugins and templates. It has a wide install base.

With sharepoint, you are basically creating lists of things, and linking them together. I think it works pretty well for basic record keeping, athough it does involve alot of data entry. One bonus is if you have all your data in excel, the import process is very simple. I would imagine that is the case with all solutions you would be looking at though...

Another bonus is that if you are using active directory, it is very easy to roll a helpdesk system, intranet site, and wiki at the same time, all in the same framework. Users can submit tickets themselves with their active directoy logins, so no need to manage multiple credential stores.

It may not be the best, but if you need to do it cheap and want integration with windows domains, you cant really go wrong with sharepoint. (cue replies telling me how wrong their sharepoint install went :))

Re:Mod me down! Sharepoint!

[Pvt_Ryan]

If you have the money a MS SMS server (or what ever they are calling the new version) may be worth looking at.

Re:Mod me down! Sharepoint!

[rrhal]

By the way the Microsoft solution for this is SCOM 2007. The next version will have support for network devices. Doesn't scale very well. This reminds me - SMARTS is an excellent product.

100 workstations and 40 servers? Spreadsheet

[Anonymous Coward]

100 workstations and 40 servers? Spreadsheet.

Don't over complicate this until you need to.

When you have 200 workstations and have completed your virtualization consolidation project and are down to 8 servers, then you'll have time to worry about all this again.

Ask again in 3 years.

Network inventory management is network managemen

[BitZtream]

This isn't a different subject than the regular once a month ask slashdot question, its just an indication that you aren't doing a very good job of network management in general and now you're trying to consider part of standard network management procedures to be something other than that.

HP NA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hewlett Packard Network Automation. Formerly Opsware NA. Also sold as Cisco NCM (Network Compliance Manager) is a full featured network management tool that should be able to do what you are looking for.

I'll second that

[charnov]

I have used this set up successfully to catalog 100's of workstations, servers, and network devices across 5 states.

I also added NetDisco for tracking and discovery of network gear.

SpiceWorks is quite nice

[flipo.org]

I recently got to know SpiceWorks and I am pretty impressed. I wonder why I haven't heard of it before, as it seems to be pretty mature (already on version 4). (I am in no way affiliated - just a happy user)

Re:SpiceWorks is quite nice

[MightyMartian]

I tried Spiceworks for a few months, but found it just an unreal pain in the ass on some workstations. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I'd get a workstation working, it would work for a week, then croak. I also found the web interface kind of clunky and non-intuitive.

In the end, I created some spreadsheets. Works pretty well, maybe doesn't have quite the depth that the "for real" management systems do, but it has important stuff like operating system, software, install keys, users, etc.

Re:SpiceWorks is quite nice

[Ali Mashaka]

Spiceworks has just gotten better with time. I've been using them for a whiiile (v1, maybe) and now at 4.0 they're much, MUCH, better then they started out. I'd really recommend giving them a shot. For a small shop like mine with a few hundred machines it's been nice wrapping most of the headachy stuff (helpdesk, inventory tracking, etc) into one place. My one worry is that they're just working toward a final product which they'll start charging for (it's been free forever).

Re:SpiceWorks is quite nice

[corerunner]

I recently moved to Spiceworks too. For the past year I've used OCS-ng, but it didn't run well on 64-bit machines. The documentation also seemed to be lacking. While I'd definitely prefer an open source solution, Spiceworks has been extremely easy so far. There is a good plugin for tracking Microsoft licenses, although I do wish they'd add the ability to track other vendors as well. If I stick with it then I might consider moving the ticketing system to Spiceworks too.

After seeing this post, I think I'll investigate OpenNMS. The main worry I have with Spiceworks is that it's not open source and may eventually become a subscription-based service.

snmp and ldap

[pthreadunixman]

1. Install/Enable an snmp agent on all your devices. 2. Write a script to walk the network and poll the devices via snmp. 3. Write the information out to ieee802Device records using macAddress as the rdn. Extend the schema as necessary. You now have a low-maintenance and scalable inventory management system.

Re:snmp and ldap

[Anonymous Coward]

Though you have impressed us with your programming skills, your reading comprehension skills are not so good.

GLPI

[ginoledesma]

It would really depend on your site requirements -- namely, what you want to track, how to correlate said info, etc.

You might want to check out GLPI. It covers the basics that most inventory management software does. The documentation is a bit lacking / confusing, but there're enough users out there who can help. It's pretty flexible, too, but seeing that the OP mentioned isn't a web coder, that's not as good a selling point.

On another note, I'd recommend searching SourceForge and Freshmeat for "inventory." It might just so happen that someone's written it in such a way that fits your needs. In my experience, every organization has always had something slightly different, where one works better than the other.

Zenoss

[4g1vn]

I have tried almost every NM platform for my clients and Zenoss is a well rounded management system. It also helps that they have both community and "Enterprise" editions. The support that we receive as an Enterprise customer is well worth the price of admission. http://www.zenoss.com/community/open-source-network-monitoring-software

IP Tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

A spreadsheet and a 2 pound sledgehammer.

OCS Inventory-NG

[Nimey]

I've been using it on an old Linux box for over 3 years now and I'm pretty pleased with it. You need a Unix or Windows computer to act as a server; on Linux it's a basic LAMP stack plus some specific PHP and Perl modules, and on Windows it comes as one package that includes everything you need. Then you install the client software on each computer that needs to be inventoried. There are clients for Windows and generic Unix (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Mac OSX, etc.).

It'll track IP address, hostname, MAC, what software's installed, username, whether it's on an Active Directory domain, subnet, all hardware including serial number. You can also configure it to use Nmap to have an auto-elected client in each subnet do a quick scan to determine what other devices are on that subnet and optionally try to detect what it is (Linux box, Windows box, printer, switch). It can also push out packages to clients.

If you want to expand some more, OCS also integrates with GLPI to provide helpdesk ticketing, license tracking, etc.

Re:OCS Inventory-NG

[jra]

The auto-discovery sounds interesting to me, and you're the 4th or 5th person who's mentioned GLPI...

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiceworks. Great community, great developers (who listen to the community), and really good out of the box software.

The server portion (currently) runs on Windows, but it will inventory and manage ANY box; Linux, Win, and Mac.

Only downside, it is ad-supported, but the cost to buy the software is so ridiculously cheap, it's worth it. (or just use adblock with firefox)

Cheers.

LanSweeper

[Anonymous Coward]

I have deployed Lansweeper and it works great. You could also buy the commercial package for a very small fee and it will provide you more features. I use it to keep track of h/w, s/w and licensing for over 1000 PCs and 100 servers. Just remember that it does not inventory non-Windows devices.

Re:GLPI & OCS

[Anonymous Coward]

We have found both GLPI & OCS to be poor choices, but with free, open source software, you don't always get stuff that works. Both are problematic, poorly supported, and are not easily configured for secure communication and access with HTTPS / SSL communications.

Re:Altiris. Now there is something rediculously e

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Altiris. Now there is something rediculously e

But if you can afford it and it does what you need, they more power to you!

Something only slightly less expensive and with similar features, are the products from Kace.com.

Asset Tracking

[cfryback]

This is a $$ solution, but we have been using Altiris Deployment server for a number of years (yes, it is a sad fact that they are owned by Symantec now....) But via Altiris, one can track EVERYTHING on a PC - MAC Address, IP Address, Serial #, Make, Model, Software and Patches installed. Works on MS, MAC and Linux. Simple Excel SpreadSheet plugin to the DB gets you a "quick and dirty" report.

Spiceworks

[ajlisows]

100 Workstations and 40 servers? You sound like a candidate for Spiceworks, if you have any Windows Servers in the environment.

Spicworks is a free (As in Beer) Hardware/Software Inventory management system with a built in help desk system. It picks up Windows Machines, Linux Machines, Switches/Hubs/Routers/Firewalls, Network Printers, etc and displays what information it can glean from them (Software installed, Hardware Serial Numbers, IP addresses, Model Numbers, etc.) You can create your own custom reports (In their own environment...but I believe they have added support so you can work directly with MSSQL and MySQL as well. Don't quote me on that though. You can set parameters in the program to alert you when a certain condition is reached (A Hard drive has less than 10% free space or Stefan in accounting has installed Limewire AGAIN). The most recent version will create a network map for you, although I already have a network map and have not had a chance to play with that part of the program.

I think it's a pretty nice program for Environments with less than 250 total network devices. The interface does seem to slow as you add more devices. All in all, I think it's a pretty nice little system to use for smaller businesses. There is a small community that pitches in to contribute reports and "Dashboard Widgets" that you may download if they appear helpful.

YOURE FIRED

[twebb72]

WTH. If you have 0.4 servers per workstation, you're already off to a bad start. Don't worry, you'll be fired soon enough so don't sweat it. It'll be someone else's problem.

Re:YOURE FIRED

[IceCreamGuy]

What? What if they do some kind of heavy duty number crunching and he's talking about his Beowulf cluster? What if they're a small, high-priced CGI company and they have three render farms of 10 boxes each and ten regular servers? What if they're a web hosting company and those are the hosts?

Re:YOURE FIRED

[jra]

As noted above, smartass, those are the executive, management, and utility workstations. That doesn't count the 499 workstations at which (ahem) actual work gets done.

And we've drawn down, on reflection; it's down to about 30 active servers now.

20:1 isn't too bad a ratio, for what we do.

And, no, after 18 months, I've gotten 2 raises and a bonus, and I'm making about twice what they hired me at.

I agree with some of the othbers. Spiceworks

[majortom1981]

We use spiceworks and its inventory rocks along with its network map. Even shows the bandwidth and stuff of your switches and routers and how much toner and stuff is left in the printers. Its free (ad supported) but you can pay for an ad free version.

What are people using to track non-networked hw?

[Full Meat]

Discovering stuff that's on the network is only part of the story for me. What techniques and tools are people using for tracking hardware that isn't on the wire (i.e. in a storeroom or still in a carton)? Does it involve barcoding or RFID?

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiceworks! www.spiceworks.com

Spiceworks. Not happy with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiceworks. Not happy with it.

No provision to secure the communications with the web interface or the communications to the machines via HTTPS/SSL or SSH. Not secure.

Poorly supported. Functions poorley, but sometimes, and with some machines, it functions, on ocassion.

OpenERP

[Anonymous Coward]

is the best tool: http://openerp.com/

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Be aware. This is the lowest value activity in an organization. Keeping track of workstations and their serial numbers. While everyone else was out making product or money, I was stuck indoors making sure all the PCs were still there.

Here's an idea... Just stop counting and tracking them all. What would happen? Who would care?

Re:Ugh

[jra]

This got modded down to zero, but there was actually a fair amount of useful information in the 2s and 1s, and I thought this one deserved an answer:

The person who cares is me: when my boss asks "so, *why* do we need to buy more workstations on top of those 70 we bought last August?"

If I don't have an answer, I won't have too happy a life.

I like NEWT

[Derwood5555]

http://www.komodolabs.com/

Zenoss

[krisbrowne42]

I have used Zenoss pretty extensively for this in the past.... Between the native SNMP tools and clients for most platforms, you can pretty extensively get a running snapshot of your network, as well as do performance and service monitoring. Depending on the SNMP plugin or client you're using, it can even do some software auditing.

140 machines?

[1u3hr]

100 workstations and 40 servers...

Not worth the hassle of implementing some high tech solution. The data sound like stuff that changes rarely if ever, stuff you need for accounting reports or such once a year, not stuff you need on a moment's notice. So I'd just use:

Loose leaf binder.

Text file.

Or, if I could be bothered, Excel worksheet.

Re:140 machines?

[jgrahn]

Loose leaf binder. Text file. Or, if I could be bothered, Excel worksheet.

A text file can be placed under revision control using e.g. CVS so it can be safely used by many people and from many places. (You also get an audit trail for free).

Excel doesn't work well with that. Plus, you need Windows machines to read it. So I'd vote for text file (although I'd prefer Excel to a web application/relational database monster).

Re:140 machines?

[1u3hr]

Once in Excel it can be exported to any kind of database, or HTML table, should that become necessary -- I'm assuming it is just flat data, basically read only, no macros and such.

Not that I have any love of Excel, but it's ubiquitous and easy to throw a small table of data like this in and get it out if you need it.

Re:140 machines?

[jra]

No, actually we tend to do 4-6 MACs a month.

But I've been a database programmer for 20 years. Data doesn't belong in (30 different copies of) a spreadsheet; it belongs in a database.

Re:140 machines?

[1u3hr]

But I've been a database programmer for 20 years. Data doesn't belong in (30 different copies of) a spreadsheet; it belongs in a database.

Of course not "30 different copies of a spreadsheet". That would be idiotic. It was never stated how or why this data would be used, I just assumed records for accounting purposes. If it needed to be interactive, it's another ball game.

And if you're a database programmer, you wouldn't even be asking the question, you'd just code it in 10 minutes.

Re:140 machines?

[jra]

Sure I would.

But my userbase doesn't know from filePro, and isn't going to tolerate a greenscreen app, and I am *not* a web toolset programmer.

IE: suck it. :-)

lansweeper

[luxifr]

if you mostly have windows boxes you may want to have a look at lansweeper... it isnt open source but its freeware - even for commercial use... its very detailed and comfortable but it has its downsides: you need an iis and an mssql (express will do) and die clients have to run an agent (with admin privileges... but thats something that could be implemented as a service or within a logon script)....

AlterPoint Device Authority

[UttBuggly]

I've had good experiences with AlterPoint. We did a very large network with it...> 10,000 devices. That was only the routers, switches, ASAs, and such. Server Support and PC Support used LanDesk.

Did some customization with PERL with no problems. Expensive, but rock solid.

NicoGroups (commercial suite)

[Anonymous Coward]

From a commercial product aspect, I came across this the other day, although haven't looked into it any further...

http://www.nicodevelopment.co.uk/products/discovery.html

Netdisco

[funkboy]

Sounds like you need Netdisco. It was originally designed to track assets on educational campus networks, and if your devices support a link-local discovery protocol (CDP, LLDP, FDP, etc) and SNMP than chances are they can be wrangled to work. It's complicated to install, but it's the best tool I've seen for really keeping track of a massive amount of devices on the network.

racktables is good too

[Anonymous Coward]

http://racktables.org/ is good too. it is free.

the good thing is you can follow things down to port level, tag on the machine, etc ...

if used fully, you could move a server room, and reassemble the same way on the new site

Barcoding is *excellent*

[cheros]

Barcoding is one of the simplest ways to do quick physical asset logging. You can get free Code 39 fonts which allow you to use even the most basic labels if you're stuck, and a decent CCD barcode reader is dirt cheap these days.

The only thing I find exceptionally annoying is Microsoft not putting the license codes in barcode format - it would be much quicker to log and enter - but I guess that's to stop people from copying them. They have obviously not heard of camera phones..

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing that I've seen out there is Spiceworks www.spiceworks.com. Does pretty much everything you are asking.

We use a custom application...

[smkndrkn]

...that I wrote in PHP. We have over 140 servers and 70+ workstations. Never mind the switches, mobile phones, monitors, demo machines and loaner equipment. Keeping track of all that in a spreadsheet was getting a little tedious. It worked but it wasn't the best solution. I wrote something up in an afternoon using php and apache that allows us to add/delete/edit equipment if you log in using apache. If you don't log in you get a ready only view of everything sorted by asset tag number.

A friend of mine recently asked me the same question you asked here...and I gave him my code. I guess it is working nicely for them. Not much of a solution for you I know but I could give you the code if you like...

Re:Why the hell would you prefer Perl and C over J

[jgrahn]

He also mentioned Python, which you conveniently omitted.

I don't know. Maybe he's a Unix guy and knows those three well. Maybe the rest of his coworkers do, too. Etc.

flat files!

[Anonymous Coward]

store your shit in lots of flat files - works for me! Automation is for nerds.

EasyVista

[the.machete]

http://www.staffandline.com/

Great tool very scalable accross domains/forests/OS etc etc

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.spiceworks.com/ --> its free and does what it says it does. The user community is great and contains how-to guides, product reviews and much more.

Belarc's Belmanage

[Anonymous Coward]

Belarc's BelManage system is what we use. Commercial software but extremely useful and easy to implement for us non-programmer types with extremely helpful support when needed (The few times I've had to contact support I usually get a response the same day by e-mail, or immediately if by phone). MS-Access, SQL, or for an extra charge Oracle database back end options. Primarily MS but also has a Linux client (no apple support which may or may not matter . Requires a stand alone box but nothing super heavy on the hardware size, and up to 100k of disk space per machine profile.

Machine profiles are viewed via web interface. Basic management is also web based but of course more advanced users can do so via the database directly. You can build your own custom reports via crystal reports (not the greatest but gets the job done) or other similar tools if you like.

www.belarc.com

Re:What are people using to track non-networked hw

[Anonymous Coward]

The Belarc commercial solution is built around a network client install configurable to update as needed but there is also a "clientless" profile that you run manually on non-networked or just any machine that can't talk to your inventory server.

Pulls 99% of software / license keys in my experience. All latest Adobe/Autodesk/Microsoft products at least it handles fine. (As of this comment.)

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows based program yes, but will manage all other devices.

http://www.spiceworks.com/

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with huckda, Spiceworks should cover all of your bases. It's ad-driven for the free version, but you have an option of paying a fee for the ads removed. We use the ad version at work for about 100 users and 175-200 pieces of hardware.

Spiceworks.com

Open AudIT

[nkcaump]

We just started using Open Audit about a month ago and it's pretty slick. It does a great job with the windows machines. Still haven't gotten it to audit our Mac machines, but working towards that goal. It does need a little massaging (hey, what doesn't!) when it comes to automating the way it audits. We run a script periodically to pull in updated information. But so far, it's doing a good job of tracking our 500 Nodes and 40 Servers.

Thumbs up to SpiceWorks...

[Intrusive_Rogue]

I was a Customer Product Advisor for them (I used the software, they banged ideas off me,) several years ago when it was in Beta. The current versions have evolved into a very very nice product. I no longer use them, because I work for an enterprise of 100000 machines. That's larger than SpiceWorks is designed to handle.

I use

[Anonymous Coward]

We use Open-audit and Nagios.... both are easy to set up and work great.

InvGate

[ledmartin]

In our network we have more than 25.000 Workstations, We use InvGate ( http://www.invgate.com/ ) as an IT Management tool, It has the best relationship between cost & functionality, it also do Hardware & Software Inventory, Software Licensing management, Software List Management, Software Deployment, Software usage analysis, Remote Desktop, Endpoint Security, It's 100% WebEnable. InvGate has plans from 200 Workstations.

network inventory management

[jjmiv]

I admin a small company that has about 50 users. We're able to track all of our assets (workstations, servers, monitors, VoIP phones, etc) using a simple excel spreadsheet. we also use spreadsheets that document the hardware configs for our servers and visio for the network set ups. the important thing that I've learned is taking the time to maintain the inventory once you've set up how to track it. if everyone in the department doesn't keep up with it...the inventory is useless.

Lansweeper

[Anonymous Coward]

Lansweeper is amazing, It will do everything you can think of and more. There is a free and paid version. Check it out! http://www.lansweeper.com/

Ex-Peregrine Asset Center

[MalikyeMoon]

I worked with a specialist for a time who was an Asset Center (once called Peregrine) consultant. That handles the level of asset management that you are looking for, and can up configured to be updated automatically from databases, network components, etc.

I use a vb script to log inventory.

[Anonymous Coward]

My department is exclusively Windows. I have less than 100 systems in my area and I use a vb script to poll my systems and build an inventory list csv file.

Spiceworks

[surgetech]

We've been using Spiceworks for a number of our customers and it does an excellent job of tracking everything you need to know about your network and individual workstations. http://spiceworks.com/ Michael Gray www.surgetechservices.com

Spiceworks

[Anonymous Coward]

We use Spiceworks for both its network scanning/inventory and helpdesk features. Has lots of great features and best of all its free!

Kiwi Cattools

[buho]

Kiwi Cattools is decent, easy to use and fairly cheap.

• Manage configurations from your desktop for network devices, including routers, switches and firewalls
• Schedule configuration backups and changes
• Generate network device configuration reports, such as port, MAC, APR and version details.
• Automatically receive email notifications about configuation changes.
• Compare the startup and running configuration of a device.

Re:Why the hell would you prefer Perl and C over J

[jra]

Not if you don't know it.

Mandriva Pulse 2

[cdelfosse]

Quoting the Pulse 2 website at http://pulse2.mandriva.org/ :

Pulse 2 - Open Source Computer System Management for medium and large organizations.

Pulse 2 helps organizations ranging from dozens to 100 000+ heterogeneous computers to inventory, maintain, update and take full control on their IT assets. It has been designed to handle 100 000+ computers spread on many sites.
It supports heterogeneous platforms such as MS Windows, GNU/Linux (Mandriva, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu., etc.), Mac OSX, HP-UX, IBM AIX and Solaris systems.

ZENworks

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend ZENworks (http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/configurationmanagement/) for asset tracking (plus tons more). I worked somewhere that had ZENworks and it was a god send. It might be overkill for what you are trying to do but it's worth it. Just take a look at it.

Easier then pie---just do show commands and regex

[Anonymous Coward]

DO a series of show commands on each, then parse in PERL or sed...
do it every day, correlate to invoices...

Least favorite language is Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot, and hating on Java just isn't going to cut it here. Your least favorite language is VB, and don't you forget it.

Versiera

[versiera]

Have a look at the Versiera infrastructure management and monitoring system https://www.versiera.com/ More info can be found at http://www.netcraftcommunications.com/ or Google search. Versiera is not open source but the Internet service is free for anyone to use. Platform and OS support includes Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, Solaris and Windows. There are also beta OpenWRT and DD-WRT agents. Capabilities include: Asset Management, Management, Monitoring (active/passive), Compliance, Automated Documentation, Ticketing, Scheduling, Jobs, Reporting of Processes, Identities, Communications, Listening Ports, Historical Changes, IPv4 and IPv6 Address collection, Time synchronization accuracy across environment, etc.

Give Spiceworks a try!

[mr.bri]

We use Spiceworks mainly for ticketing, and they make regular updates (about every month or two) that increase usability. It has come leaps and bounds over the past couple of years.

And, it only takes 10 minutes to setup. Try it!

Oh, and it's free (ad supported). You can pay $200/year or so if you don't want the ads. Their support is quick and they have an active user community.

Re:Give Spiceworks a try!

[jmitshim]

spiceworks? it's so slow, and never found more than a half of all our nodes. not recommended, even though it's free = ads driven = traffic consumptive. anyway, after 6 months trialing of all (!) existing free and paid apps for network inventory we ended up buying an unlimited license of network inventory advisor by clearapps (check it here: www.clearapps.com) and we are very happy with it now. the updates are very frequent, tech support is always available for a call, it's a true 1-click solution to scan your whole network (2000+ nodes), no need for extra applications and manual configs at all. recommended! they have recently given away 25-node license, and I have a reseller discount coupon of 10%, which you are welcome to use: TNPCNT-DSCPL

I've looked at several of the recommended packages

[jra]

And a couple of them look interetsing, notably AudIT, and maybe Spiceworks, though both it and GLPI want to also do my ticketing for me, and you know how hard switching ticketing systems is...

But the thing that seems critical to me, that I'm not sure any of these systems actually do, is that machine serials, license, even IP addresses -- these are each *separate* inventories, not attributes of some other inventory item.

No one of them is the primary key: each is -- in its own table; this is how you avoid IP collisions, software double installs, and the like: if the license key has been installed, you can *see* that; even if it hasn't, it's *still there in the inventory*.

Assignment of an IP to a machine, or installation of a key on a machine, those processes should be *associations* of inventory rows already in separate tables, not the assignment of a value to the attribute "Office License Key" on a specific machine serial number record.

That's what I'll be looking for while I evaluate; if none of them work that way, I too may have to break down and write one...

The complete list

[jra]

of sites for suggested packages is below. It will take me about a week to go through them all, but I'll try to get a posting up here next weekend closing the loop; thanks y'all.

http://opennms.org/

http://www.lanrev.com/

http://www.glpi-project.org/?lang=en

http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/

http://www.open-audit.org/

http://www.kwoksys.com/

http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=altiris

http://www.spiceworks.com

http://www.belarc.com

http://www.i-doit.org/

http://opennetadmin.com/

http://www.zenoss.com/community/open-source-network-monitoring-software

http://www.komodolabs.com/

http://netdisco.org/

http://racktables.org/

http://www.staffandline.com/

http://www.invgate.com/

http://www.kiwisyslog.com/kiwi-cattools-overview/

http://pulse2.mandriva.org/

https://www.versiera.com/

http://www.netcraftcommunications.com/

http://openerp.com/

Racktables

[Geekanoid]

I use Racktables for my environment. I didn't like how the other tools were tying in a ticketing and asset management with the datacenter map. I decided that the best approach is to have a dedicated for our DataCenter inventory and another system for tickets. For my team, it is much easier to manage.