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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?
> Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system.
Oh, my, yes. This. Getting buy-in from the people who actually do the work, so that they know why you selected certain features, is incredibly helpful. This applies to accounting, VOIP, trouble ticket systems, Wikis, email, and any other IT supported system. And the people on the ground may know of critical features or flaws that their own supervisors are simply unaware of or which get "summarized" out of the critical feature list at the several dozens of meetings before such a project is actually implemented.
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!
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
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.