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

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.

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.

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.

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...