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Ask Slashdot: What Asset Tracking Software Do You Recommend?
grahamsaa writes: I work for an organization that has a number of physical assets, as well as presence in multiple data centers. On the DC side, there are a number of specific things we need to track (one thing we want to be able to account for is how much power do we need for each rack). On the office side, our needs are more basic. We need to be able to tag and track laptops, workstations, monitors, etc. I would like to use a single system for all of this, but have yet to find something that will work well on the office side and the data center side. Free/open source solutions are preferred, but we're prepared to spend money on a commercial solution if it meets our needs. What would you recommend?
...altaris was a whole ticket/asset management system.
Access+Javascript+MongoDB+Visual Basic.
If you manage to use this system, tracking laptops will be a piece of cake in comparison.
There are many different ways of tracking things. How is tracking power usage and location of a laptop the same thing though?
Honestly, I've seen some of the most successful implementations of asset tracking implemented in trivial homegrown spreadsheets and databases. I'll also seen complete disaster and disarray in multi-million dollar commercial applications.
The difference: the people and process. When it comes to asset tracking in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment (e.g., not an Amazon warehouse), no tool is going to replace good process and procedure since there will be error-prone and lazy humans in the process. You need to get religious about these sorts of things if you want them to work. No nifty tool will substitute.
My two cents.
Hello OP,
You should give LanSweeper a try, it has a bunch of useful tools and automatic reports, plus you can create custom reports for nearly anything. We've used it for over a year now, it's a relatively cheap solution for incredible flexibility. It's been invaluable for us.
Cheers
... kitten kaboodle...
Learn Dutch ya goob
nLyte is what we use. it sounds like it would fit your needs.
You are either a small company, in which case Excel suffices, or you are a large company, in which case there is no single product that fits all your requirements which makes Excel the best compromise.
Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system. Find out what your accounting needs are ahead of time. Your accountants will need to have a fixed asset list for tax and reporting purposes. This is THE most important function of an asset tracking system. Whatever you do make damn sure it is easily compatible with the needs of the accounting department. Otherwise you are costing the company money and making life needlessly difficult. It may be that your accountants have modest needs like in my company - we do ours directly in our accounting software and that's fine for us. But if you are considering specialty software to keep track then chances are that you should be including your finance and accounting people in this conversation before you install anything.
Pros: Simple to setup. Customizable. Free. Cons: A bit of a learning curve getting started but the docs are good as long as you can RTFM http://racktables.org/
I've been using http://snipeitapp.com/ Pretty easy to set up on a box in digital ocean, very low maintenance after I got it all set up and working, and if you'd rather not host it yourself you can pay them to do it. Has QR code/label printing capabilities, user management, less-detailed accessory tracking for keyboards and mice (i.e. there's like 20 keyboards over in accounting, and I have 5 available, but i know who has the other 12, and that 3 are broken). Can create reports of how much stuff costed, upload receipts to each asset, when warranty expires, all kinds of stuff. My only bitch about this was how you have to fill out the model before creating an asset under that model, which meant a lot of tedious tabbing back and forth while setting it up. Now that I have all the standard models of phones, laptops, and other hardware that we buy filled it, adding a new asset and assigning it to someone takes like a minute. The developer is super responsive to bugs and questions on her github page: http://github.com/snipe/snipe-...
None of the things we looked at provided what we wanted either (grant it this was back in 2001). So 3-4 of us made our own. We didn't do anything with server racks (as at the time we were still mostly a Sun Micro house with the hardware actually being an entire rack or half rack). So we went the Apache+MySQL+PHP route, and made a HTML based system. We put in floor scans of the buildings/office/cubical layouts and made the cubicle/office regions as click maps so you could navigate visually to get lists of equipment in a location (as well as move equipment to and from locations). We also wrote a program that worked with a barcode scanner that allowed you to scan the barcode on the cubicle/office itself and then scan the barcodes in the office and it updated the records to that location. We had the basic info on the hardware itself (system type, mac address, serial number, barcode, cpu type and speed, hostname(s), system status (online, offline, maintenance, etc.), hard drive(s) (make, model, serial numbers, sizes), and of course location. We also had comment sections so that we could write up any issues we had, as well as a history of edits (previous locations, changes in hostname, or network information, etc). Hardest part to maintain the system is making sure everyone uses it if they move something. It worked very well for a number of years, but has been put asside lately due to politics (it wasn't the "official" corporate inventory system). We had it because the "official" one sucked with no interface other than search, no history of changes, and no graphical interface for being able to easily set/change locations (since many people didn't remember to look at the cubicle number, but remembered it was on the second floor, third isle, first one on the left... assuming they didn't bring the barcode scanner with them).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
It has excellent ASCII support.
The problem though is if it's easy for the accountants but difficult to use by the staff (like Magic), you'll only have the basic asset information and we'll continue to use what works for us.
The amount of information that accounting needs is generally pretty modest (asset ID, description, cost, location, acquisition date). But you ignore the needs of your accounting department at your company's peril. You don't have to favor any particular department's needs but you damn well ought to be working closely with accounting when deciding what to use when it comes to asset tracking. Accounting WILL need that information for tax and reporting purposes. If an audit occurs this information WILL be looked at. I've seen plenty of companies make the foolish mistake of picking some tracking software based solely on the operational needs without considering how it affects other departments.
I recommend you start by doing your own homework before asking open, badly defined questions expecting precise answers. Where is your requirements document? I mean, real requirements, no a vague and generic description of what is asset tracking.
Achille Talon
Hop!
vi.
My work has so many computers that the I.T. department can't locate them all in multiple buildings. If they have to locate a particular computer, they often use a bar code scanner to scan each computer room by room, download the data to a spreadsheet, and hope to find a match with the asset tag. Since they're doing a PC refresh, the new computers have active WIFI tags glued to the case to make it easier to map out and find these computers.
one of the interesting new products is Oogway. Website: www.oogway.fi
This may be overkill for JUST Asset, but ServiceNow is fantastic. The full enterprise version can tie into basically all your other systems, including requests, procurement, receiving, financial, etc, and can be set up for hardware and software management. Especially if you're maybe considering moving your service desk/help desk to something else, ServiceNow is worth looking at. It's honestly one of the best tool for this kind of management I've seen. Alternatively, I know Flexera is very well liked throughout the industry, although I've never worked with it.
I repeatedly wrote and used a fairly big pile of scripts, over various platforms. Shell, but mostly Powershell on Windows, starting from when it was just available.
It worked wonders: I made information gathering scripts to scrape ALL available sources, dynamically queried from the devices, or static from other sources, including whatever crooked enterprise solution was already wasting electricity. I had them run one a or a few times per day generating raw results.
Then a second layer of scripts would make useful combinations and comparison lists.
A third layer would then form presentation lists.
I made the third type available to complete idiots, the second to lesser idiots, and the first to nobody (no higher level available...)
It worked wonders, everybody wanted and used that information, I could usually provide any "report" almost on the spot, whereas previously, making such a "report" would have been a regularly repeated onetime action (!), requireing a small project, weeks of time, and mostly lots of networking, server, and most of all database "experts" claiming it was difficult and infighting each other.
The only thing is: do it under the radar of management, they need their enterprise systems and projects to be able to claim success.
I do not work for the company that makes the product I am recommending, nor do I have any affiliation, relationship, association or any other connection to them except the one where I give them some money every year and they let me use their product in return.
I use and recommend a product called Lansweeper. The cost is very reasonable, uses WMI, and SNMP for asset scanning. It can do everything it's designed to do without an agent or you can deploy a small, non-resident agent if bandwidth considerations are critical. It stores all it's information in a standardized SQL format (can use MS free SQL express) if you don't already own SQL in your environment. It's reporting capabilities are fantastic. The interface is all web enabled and can run on it's proprietary web hosting or can use IIS.
We pay $1500 US once a year and the license allows us to run as many scanning servers as we need. There are no limits on the number of nodes that can be scanned or data that can be stored. Maint is so easy you can have a low level tech manage the thing. And because of the standardized data structure, several of our other organizations pull data from it daily. Our ticketing system (Service Now) has regular reporting and direct ties into the lansweeper database. Security is not the primary focus because it is meant to be entirely internal with no public interface. however you can limit access in a very granular way using AD security groups or individual ID. It scans MAC, Linux, switches, routers, cisco gear, VOIP, windows workstations and servers, you name it. It also has a fairly robust software management component although we don't rely on that set of features as much as we could.
We've been running it in my company for over three years now and even though we have SCCM, Service Now, Sailpoint and a number of other products that are critical for very niche requirements, everyone in the IT organization that has need to gather and maintain asset management uses this product and I do overhear them talk about it with respect, especially when you consider the cost. Not going to link to their site but you can easily google Lansweeper to get there. The company is out of Belgium I believe and I found them by asking questions in the BSA forums.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
Why aren't you people replaced entirely by computers yet?
That's as stupid a question as asking why engineers haven't been replaced by computers yet. I happen to be both an engineer and an accountant and I do both as a part of my job running a manufacturing company. Anyone who would ask that question simply doesn't understand or is willfully ignorant of what it is that accountants do for a living.
If you think that is possible to get rid of accounting with automation go ahead and try. If you succeed there is a Nobel prize in it for you. (not joking or even being sarcastic - there really would be a Nobel prize awarded for such an achievement) Accounting is hugely automated already but it is basically impossible to fully automate it until we develop some seriously advanced human level AI. Some (such as yourself) have this naive notion that accounting is a simple programmatic task of paper shuffling and that is completely false. There is substantial human judgement required to do it correctly. Many of the issues accountants deal with do not have single straightforward answers. If it was a simple enough job to be automated by computers it already would have been. Companies don't spend money on accounting because they think it is a good investment. There would be HUGE profits to be made if accounting functions could be fully automated.
What is the point of counting pebbles in an era of computers, energy and technology?
Because "counting pebbles" determines whether those computers, energy and technology are profitable or not. It ensures that financial information is accurate. It allows rational decisions making about what to invest in. This was, is and will remain a vital function of any business.
Spiceworks.
or alternatively, a notepad
And to someone who works in a data center, the most important things are tracking power draw, heat dissipation, and cooling requirements.
Sorry but no. The financial aspects of asset tracking are at the end of the day paramount in a corporation. Those are important second order considerations as far as the business is concerned. Management of the company will only care about those things insofar as they affect profitability.
There is no one solution that fits all needs, and every user (like you) is going to claim that their needs are "priority one."
Given that the fixed asset list determines the value of assets on the balance sheet and the amount of depreciation, profits and taxes, I feel quite confident in claiming that the most important function of asset tracking in an organization is the financial one. That is the one that the owners of the company and the IRS and SEC are going to give a crap about. While I am by no means saying that the other purposes of an asset list are unimportant (they can be vital), tracking assets is fundamentally an accounting task by definition no matter which department is actually using the tools to do it.
It really depends on your needs, but I suggest looking at your overall IT needs and making a platform play. Independant inventory systems aren't much more than fancy spreadsheets, and then even if they are up to date, the immediate request is - "Ok, Bob, now find every out of warranty system from Dell." But your spreadsheet had the original warranty and doesn't track warranty extensions. Or, ok Bob, every HP Z720 needs the following critical drivers installed, or has been approved for moving to Windows 8 or 10 as a pilot, your inventory system can do that right? I personally prefer the options in Microsoft's System Center suite - using ConfigMgr for automatic discovery, using Service Manager as the CMDB for inventory of misc other assets. Then again, I'm biased as I deploy CM for a living. That said, it's what many very large enterprises use successfully. It automates discovery where possible, but allows extension (manually unfortunately, but it does support extension as you need). System Center has a lot of value in other areas as it also includes a lot of other tools for virtualization, backup of servers or workstations, operations monitoring and general automation/orchestration. Again, I'm biased as that's the platform I know the most. For the free side, I used to use SpiceWorks until we upgraded to System Center. It worked, but it didn't have nearly the systems management capabilities or a lot of the useful add-ins. It's quite good for basic needs if just inventory is your game and there is a good community around it. I just kept running into the scenario where I had the inventory info, but had no way of tying that inventory info into other projects in meaningful ways - such as "Hey, deploy this GPO to all of the systems in this subnet, but no one else." I would know systems in the subnet, but had no way of tying it (easily) into an AD security group or OU.
Just try to do better than these guys.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Free/open source solutions are preferred, but we're prepared to spend money on a commercial solution if it meets our needs. What would you recommend?
Microsoft Office - Excel and/or Access...
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Well, a very small perl script would probably make more sense, but shell will do. Barcode all the rooms, step 1. Barcode all the equipment, step 2. Now run around scanning everything, scan the room on the way in and the way out. A small script can validate your data, make sure you scanned each room twice and diddle the file if not. Then another small script, making the script slightly larger, or a reporting tool can generate your report. You should be able to get this data into a format that will go into anything.
This is what we did at the County of Santa Cruz HSA almost 20 years ago, with some credit card-sized barcode readers. Today I'd hope to use a scanning reader, not one you have to slide over the code; and one with a keypad, so that you can enter codes that you can't conveniently scan.
Having the data in an intermediate, platform-agnostic format means that you never get locked in. Make sure that you have an interim step, whatever asset tracking system you actually use. And some people will never need anything more complicated that some database tables and a reporting tool, like crystal reports or what have you. There are free reporting tools available, with which I have no familiarity. I got paid to learn Crystal. It sucks, but it works, mostly. You wind up having to do crap like implement basic sorts yourself (not being trained as a programmer, I looked them up on wikipedia and translated psuedocode into the VB dialect used by crystal) if you want to do something simple like calculate a median, so I can't actually recommend it... but it would produce asset reports.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, it won't be that way until we shoot all the lawyers. They're the ones responsible for all the blood-sucking, money-grubbing leech laws that make accounting so complicated.
Has (almost) nothing to do with lawyers or the lack thereof. Even seemingly basic things like how to classify transactions appropriately is not a trivial task. Let me give you an example. What is an appropriate useful lifetime for a milling machine so that you can determine a depreciation schedule? There is no single correct answer to this question. We have rules about it but the rules are just generalisms not actually correct in most cases. Another example. What is the current market value of building you purchased 20 years ago? You can guess at the answer but you cannot know for certain unless you sell it. So you either have to guess or you have to use an answer from 20 years ago that you know is wrong.
Accounting can be made more complicated by the lawmakers but it isn't a primary driver for that. A lot of the difficulty is simply in trying to answer questions for which there is insufficient data to make a correct answer.
My company has been using a program called Asset Track for the last 14 months and have been happy with it. We were able to import our existing fixed asset spreadsheets and connect it up with our SQL Server database. We have it on a couple of desktops where we print bar code labels and use it on a couple of Surface Pro tablets for running inventory. We've started testing RFID labels as well. Our needs are pretty basic but it works great for what we use it for. I believe it is Windows only.
www.obtain.com
https://www.tracmor.com/ has been working for us. uses mysql database backend so its easy to add additional reporting and to do integration with other systems.
I highly recommend using RT for tickets, and installing a plugin called Asset Tracker. You can have multiple types of assets with different fields for each asset, link assets in tickets, use REST or their command line tool for automated queries/updates, and much more. It is all open source, modular, and very easy to modify.
Sigh.
A very eloquent retort.
This is only relevant because of overcomplicated tax laws, which are the result of too many lawyers, like I said. The law should not give a shit about depreciation.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. Complication in accounting can be in response to legal issues but legal issues (and lawyers specifically) are NOT the primary driver of it in most cases. The primary source of difficulty in accounting is simply incomplete data followed closely by the fact that there are multiple answers to many accounting issues. Classification or transactions and valuation of assets and liabilities is frequently difficult, ambiguous or even impossible to do accurately. Invoking the problems lawyers and politicians can cause adds to the pile but does not create the fundamental difficulties in accounting in most cases.
To address your rebuttal. The law doesn't give a shit about depreciation specifically. The law gives a shit about an accurate representation of the financial position of a company. Depreciation is a portion of that. Depreciation is a thing because if you buy a really expensive asset and expense it all at once it can give a rather twisted picture of the financial prospects of the company because it doesn't accurately capture the matching principle. As a second order effect of this companies would use expensing of assets to weasel out of taxes they should rightly owe and use it to manage earnings for Wall Street even more than they do now. That would involved lawyers but it isn't the source of the complication. If you have a better solution than depreciation (expense everything isn't one) I'd love to hear it but a lot of really smart people haven't come up with anything more practical. IFRS is pushing really hard on mark-to-market accounting but that is fraught with all sorts of issues. Believe me as someone who has to deal with depreciation in my day job I don't care much for it but it's a practical necessity to keep financial statements meaningful in many cases.
That's a highly subjective question, it's not simply accounting. It's politics. And then we get back to lawyers.
It IS a highly subjective question and that subjectivity has NOTHING to do with politics or lawyers. The value of a building is what someone is willing to buy it for. It's subjective after a sale because you cannot know the value of something unless there is either A) a liquid market for a near identical asset or B) you actually sell it. Since that does not describe the majority of assets any answer you come up with will be either a guess or a no longer accurate purchase price (book value). Since guesses are fraught with problems we tend to disallow them for practical reasons. You can probably make a decent guess but your answer will be wrong. There are follow on consequences can involve lawyers and politicians but they are generally a second order effect at most.
Stop involving 3rd parties. Set up a web server, hook in a database, build an interface, there you have it.
Honestly if you'd quit imagining this stuff is so over your head that it cannot be accomplished your going to get raped in the bank account by every tom dick and harry with a keyboard.
>there will be error-prone and lazy humans in the process
There may be a few thieves too.
Barcode on the forehead and by the genitals should be enough for satellites and humans to track them. TSA research has shown that those areas will be watched most diligently.
I use ipplan, check it out
http://sourceforge/projects/ip...
http://iptrack.sourceforge.net...
resist propaganda
It's very clear that this is a mission-critical application need.
I recommend a clustered Oracle database with no less than four 8-core Wintel servers having at least 1 TB of RAM on each system along with 2 TB hard drives with a RAID 5 cluster and heartbeat connection between each pair of servers. Since we all know that California is a goner when the big one hits, you clearly need a RT (real-time, for you noobs!) connection with the same configuration located on the other side of the country. In fact, if you're a multi-national then its advisable to take a tax writeoff and host yet another same configuration in fscking Ireland too!
If that doesn't get you a renewable annual budget and a job-for-life then you need to become a manager and outsource the whole fscking thing to India where they'll do the work for minimum wage (what's that, $0.10/hour?) and you can manage it locally and report to the Board each year of all the hard work that you do.
Or just use a sqlite database with a small front-end configuration and Bob's your Uncle.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
...it runs over MySQL, so it is fairly extensible. It is not too much more than the next level after spreadsheets, however it does all the basics and some more. Visualisation and interaction is decent. Warrantee tracking, location, network coordinates, commet fields are all there. Vendors, contacts, files to attach, easily accesible. Not the biggest canon but it does the job and can interface sufficiently for business needs. Enjoy.
CMD BUILD open source cmdbuild.org/en
ITTL, fully customizable.
Also, Snipe-IT is free and open source. Mandriva used to have Pulse 2 but they have gone under - there may be a fork. I have not seen it in Mageia but I have only started to play with that distro. I have a buddy who speaks highly of ResourceSpace but he is kind of an idiot about some things. I believe you can find that at SourceForge or maybe at the author's site. Google should help with these.
KGIII
The arbitrary post count rule has impacted me. They say I have posted 50 times but that seems a little high. Oh well. I am posting this AC because of this. I hate posting AC and this is the only reason I do so. Either way, do not waste mod points on this drivel. I am simply sharing what I knew about. If they can not read AC posts screw 'em...
It's open-source, but you can contract with them to do support and setup. The asset management plugin is easy to add and works great.
Incredibly customizable as well. They also have an incident response module that may be worthwhile to look at if you're managing multiple datacenters.
kitten kaboodle
kit and caboodle (n.), also kaboodle, 1861, from kit (n.1) in dismissive sense "number of things viewed as a whole" (1785) + boodle "lot, collection," perhaps from Dutch boedel "property." Kit also was paired with other words in similar formations.
Although, I suppose the "kitten [ck]aboodle" could mean "Young cat stuff".
Again, speaking as a different accountant use something that ties into the accounting records. Accounting department track every penny they spend and need good accurate records that tie into the general ledger (think balance sheet). That said the operational side may want to track things that are too small in value (say $250) for the accounting folks to set up as an asset. Depending on the needs of the operational folks this may be able to be done with some sort of comment or flex field depending on the system chosen. Hopefully the accounting can assign a $0.00 value or a $0.01 value to items so they can be tracked with no cost, the $0.01 assets can be written off the first year. As others have said the process is as or more important than anything. At all costs avoid parallel databases as they are impossible to maintain. Depending on your comment/flex field you can many times include something like 10W 15BTU. If your comment/flex field format is consistent you can suck this info into excel and parse it for your operational needs. Sometimes there are unused fields already set up in the accounting software you can use to track you operational needs. One thing accounting systems are very good at is keeping track of and totaling numbers. Good luck!
A far more important question is do you already fully understand exactly what data you need to log and keep? That data will define your final solution.
Is the data updated by one person? Or by multiple people where a simple file based solution could cause people to override each other's stuff?
Is the data updated dynamically by scanning which devices are present on the network and marking stale devices?
Do you know exactly what data you want to track? (just serial numbers, or also makes and models etc)
Do you know all the data that any other department may want? (It sucks when your massive database is missing a column and takes weeks to gather new data).
Now does any of that above fit into an off the shelf solution? You will typically find a few possible scenarios here:
1. Buy something off the shelf and fit your data into its model of what it thinks you need.
2. Home grow something with either simple spreadsheets or a simple database. (Don't discount a spreadsheet as an option for tracking a few thousand items if only one person controls the data).
3. Spend bit to buy something off the shelf that someone will customise for your needs.
LANDesk ALM will track everything you need. From Workstations and Servers to the seat they sit in. All you need is an asset tag for the furniture. The hardware is tracked via an inventory agent installed to the OS, Windows, MAC, and all distros of Linux. The hardware can be imported from the vendors website so the second it hits the network you know where it is. It is one of the best I have seen by far.
GLPI: Free IT And Asset Management Software.
Once upon a time, a company called Tangram Enterprise Solutions, Inc. created a product named Asset Insight that was the first enterprise-scale tool for IT asset tracking (circa 1996). Other tools, like LAN Desk (mentioned in another post) were LAN-only tools, and focused on DOS / Windows. Tangram's AI was cross-platform (Windows, DOS, MacOS 1-9, MacOS X, Unix, Linux). And it was built to scale for enterprises, minimizing bandwidth use (both directions), not rely on non-WAN broadcast protocols, and storing data in a real database (Oracle at the time) rather than something limited like Access. It handled both hardware discovery and manual input. It could scan networks for non-reported assets. It could install itself across the network if given admin permissions (both Windows and Unix/Linux). It could incorporate any sort of asset discovery (such as SNMP, or customer-specific) via an extensible database architecture. It was highly configurable (chose which scan modules to deploy). And software discovery could be Windows registry-based or file signature based.
Alas, as Gordon Letwin once related, the best technology doesn't always win. Via acquisition by Opsware, AI is now buried inside HP somewhere. Would have made great open source.
Bookkeeping might be done by computers, assuming there's someone around to type in the numbers.
The purpose of accounting is to tell you how the company is doing.
Here's my example. You're a publisher, and you have a warehouse of paper books. Lost of copies of few best-sellers, and a lot of others. Now how much is that inventory worth?
The easy way is just do add up the wholesale price of all those copies and add them together.
That would probably be dead wrong. The best-sellers might sell that much, but the others? In the next ten years, you might sell quite a few of these, but you don't know which ones. And if you take a guess which ones are going to sell and which are worthless, you'll probably be wrong, and if you go so far as to throw out ones you think are worthless ones, you'll end up tossing a lot of books that someone might suddenly want to buy five years from now.
So how much is this inventory worth? I dunno. A good accountant should be able to give you a better estimate than "I dunno".
-- hendrik
Spiceworks is pretty good for the office environment (PC's, Laptops, printers, etc.) .... reports PC users, printer ink levels, and a number of other useful items in your environment.
OpenDCIM http://www.opendcim.org/ is a decent datacenter management application. We've found it very useful for cataloging servers, devices, tape libraries, storage, etc. You can add asset tags, assign ownership to departments. You can also define connections between devices which can be very useful if you take the time to accurately audit all your equipment. It also allows to enter weight, power use, and air flow. Searching is basic, but can be very useful if you have a lot of racks. It also allows for creating a picture map of your datacenter and defining clickable areas that are not only clickable (to bring you to the rack in question) but also color coded to indicate rack capacity, weight, etc.
Planning on using the world-wide single source of protected by the most powerful supercomputer on earth. One bitcoin contains addressable ledger units for 100 million pieces of unreproduceable data that is time stamped and traceable to any previous owner if applicable. And I will be able to access this ledger at anyplace with a connection to the internet any time.
Transfer of ownership will simply be sending the private key to sign for the asset to the next owner. I will also be able to make smart contracts with the assets so each can act as their own code based on specific instructions when conditions are met. (i.e. transfer themselves to their new owner when payments are received).
This might be one area where SaaS is a legitimate option. With all the complex process and data management involved in Asset Management, you could benefit from a system that already has process and data standards defined, and where your organization's inexperience with this type of software isn't as big a liability.
We are the 198 proof..
If yours is truly a large organization with a lot of assets in a lot of locations.
Is cooperation of the people owning the assets.
If you are in a large corporation like mine the issue is not the asset management software. Which ever you choose will probably be fine. But making people input the data or reporting their assets. The more information that you ask the less likely you'll get a response.
Unless the decree comes from high above with a "Do this or else" warning, it wont matter if it's free or cost a million dollars it will be useless.
What ever you do don't try using "Wife V1.0" it's almost impossible to uninstall without getting all of your assets frozen.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Struxurware Plant operation Ampla or Wonderware MES
This is a fully implemented DCIM solution. RFCODE.com
Look into BelManage from belarc.com. Trial available,
Every inventory system is crap. The functionality can be there, that isn't the issue. The problem is maintaining current data.
Here's the treadmill:
1). Great effort is expended in gathering a current inventory;
2). Lacklustre effort is then expended on keeping said inventory current, over time;
3). Staff perceive the lack of current data. All incentive to update "old data" vanishes. Update activity stops completely;
4). Goto Step 1.
Use active asset scanning technology. It's imperfect, it loads the devices and network. Results are frequently unreadable. And yet it's still better than the gerbil wheel of passive inventory databases.
Samanage
Avoid HP Service Manager and CA CMDB. In the latter case, if you have no choice and have to use it then consider quitting.
Check out Patchmanager.
Theres no auto population sadly, but its about as customizable as anything i've seen and fully gui.