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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?
Access+Javascript+MongoDB+Visual Basic.
If you manage to use this system, tracking laptops will be a piece of cake in comparison.
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.
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-...
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.
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))]