IT Asset Management and Discovery

[Theldron]

Hi,

 

At wits end. After reaching 400 assets on Spiceworks, trying to add 401 is not happening, it flakes out on me and crashes. So I think I (and the school) are going to have to stop messing with free(open source) solutions and buy something decent. I know this has been discussed before (many times), but is there something people could recommend? Either that or I return to an Excel doc or give GLPI and OCS/Fusion another chance?

 

Is it worth having IT Asset Management and Discovery in the same package?

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Cheers

Sean

[ADMaster]

What assets are you looking to discover / manage. A live view / status or just inventory?

I like PDQ Inventory it has paid and free versions. It goes along nicely with pdq deploy. It will inventory all of your windows machines on a domain. Software/hardware and much more. With the paid versions you can define custom scans to look at specific reg keys or files. It is useful for checking the state of a setting such as smbv1.

 

My help desk solarwinds also as an asset piece. It is more of a static inventory. It can pull in information from SCCM and some other sources, but mostly static. I import most of the assets via spreadsheet.

 

I have NPM / switchmap so that takes care of the network infrastructure inventory but they are also in a spreadsheet.

 

I gave up on spiceworks years ago I have ~700 devices.

[jthompson]

OCS and GLPI here. It's a bit of a job to set it all up, but it's free and has been absolutely bullet proof here for years. The only other product I've any experience of is School Asset Manager a few years ago, but that wasn't anything like as useful as OCS/GLPI. It didn't have any discovery capability, iirc and the interface had nowhere near the same level of functionality.

 

I've not got OCS/GLPI doing SNMP discovery of switches and the like, I've put those all into GLPI manually. In terms of computer hardware, it gathers as much as we've ever needed and keeps those records up to date. We also record hardware problems, maintenance history and purchase & warranty info there too. The search functions in GLPI are nice and powerful: we find it works just as well for quick little lookups as it does for the heavier, more complex reporting.

 

The only downside for me would be the time you have to invest to get it all going in the first place.

[localzuk]

We use SCCM combined with our new helpdesk software here - SiteHelpdesk-IT.

[Theldron]

OCS and GLPI here. It's a bit of a job to set it all up, but it's free and has been absolutely bullet proof here for years. The only other product I've any experience of is School Asset Manager a few years ago, but that wasn't anything like as useful as OCS/GLPI. It didn't have any discovery capability, iirc and the interface had nowhere near the same level of functionality.

 

I've not got OCS/GLPI doing SNMP discovery of switches and the like, I've put those all into GLPI manually. In terms of computer hardware, it gathers as much as we've ever needed and keeps those records up to date. We also record hardware problems, maintenance history and purchase & warranty info there too. The search functions in GLPI are nice and powerful: we find it works just as well for quick little lookups as it does for the heavier, more complex reporting.

 

The only downside for me would be the time you have to invest to get it all going in the first place.

 

Hi Mate, Have you got it setup on windows or linux?

[Al_NetSupport]

Hi,

 

At wits end. After reaching 400 assets on Spiceworks, trying to add 401 is not happening, it flakes out on me and crashes. So I think I (and the school) are going to have to stop messing with free(open source) solutions and buy something decent. I know this has been discussed before (many times), but is there something people could recommend? Either that or I return to an Excel doc or give GLPI and OCS/Fusion another chance?

 

Is it worth having IT Asset Management and Discovery in the same package?

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Cheers

Sean

 

Hi Sean,

 

What kind of assets you looking to track across your school network ? If you are focusing on the IT side ( as opposed to furniture fixed assets) , so devices + SNMP network kit, then many on EduGeek use NetSupport DNA. Its a lot more than just inventory, but includes discovery, deployment and SNMP device monitoring, so may or may not be what you are looking for, but you never know.

 

Al. ( from NetSupport).

[jthompson]

Hi Mate, Have you got it setup on windows or linux?

 

I've got them running in a linux VM (Ubuntu). I originally set it up about 5 years ago, and just recently did a rebuild with Ubuntu 16.04 and the latest OCS and GLPI versions. I documented all the steps I did to set up the new server with apache, MySQL, etc. and all the required packages and installation steps. If you're interested I could send you copy (would have to strip out a few things specific to our environment).

[Theldron]

I've got them running in a linux VM (Ubuntu). I originally set it up about 5 years ago, and just recently did a rebuild with Ubuntu 16.04 and the latest OCS and GLPI versions. I documented all the steps I did to set up the new server with apache, MySQL, etc. and all the required packages and installation steps. If you're interested I could send you copy (would have to strip out a few things specific to our environment).

 

That'd be awesome cheers mate.

[Theldron]

Hi Sean,

 

What kind of assets you looking to track across your school network ? If you are focusing on the IT side ( as opposed to furniture fixed assets) , so devices + SNMP network kit, then many on EduGeek use NetSupport DNA. Its a lot more than just inventory, but includes discovery, deployment and SNMP device monitoring, so may or may not be what you are looking for, but you never know.

 

Al. ( from NetSupport).

 

Hi Al,

 

It is solely the IT side of assets that I am looking at. I have looked at Netsupport DNA and it looks good, but of course the money side is a big thing with budgets at the moment. What pricing are we looking at for this mate?

[psydii]

We use SysAid.

 

We use it to track incidents, requests, problems, changes.

Asset discovery via subnet, wmi smnp etc as well as (simpler to set up) via the client.

Assets convert to Configuration Items, as do Users and Group. We currently have over 4000 CIs in it.

Assets can have an owner set so you can see who has a device. We also use customised requests to track various common bespoke-to-us requests.

Applications installed is also discoverable, and convertible/linkable into Configuration Items too.

Configuration Items can be linked, to incidents, requests and changes.

 

So when somebody asks you about a problem asset you can see the entire history of the device, every ticket, request, and change. If it is a PC you can even see the login history.

 

We've even created a custom CI type for all our Group Policy objects, so change requests can be linked to those and provide a better audit trail than having to ask round the office who last fiddled with one.

 

It has saved hours when having to cross reference any of the above, and provides a great way of demonstrating how things are going to SLT (incidents vs request. Items raised by the team vs items raised by staff/students, asset ages, warranty/software renewal reminders). Really get out what you put in.

 

Installations and upgrades couldn't be simpler and there is, of course, a cloud option where new features land more often.

[Al_NetSupport]

Hi Al,

 

It is solely the IT side of assets that I am looking at. I have looked at Netsupport DNA and it looks good, but of course the money side is a big thing with budgets at the moment. What pricing are we looking at for this mate?

 

Sent you a PM, but we are doing an offer at the moment for £3 a licence, we also are fairly unique in the Edu space in that we also have a Helpdesk product which integrates directly with NetSupport DNA.

 

Al

[Theldron]

Thanks to all who have contacted me, for the moment until I know more re budgets I am having a play with setting up GLPI in a Ubuntu 17.04 VM, have got it all installed but am recieveing this error in glpi install?

 

 

Any ideas?

Cheers

[jthompson]

Thanks to all who have contacted me, for the moment until I know more re budgets I am having a play with setting up GLPI in a Ubuntu 17.04 VM, have got it all installed but am recieveing this error in glpi install?

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]44374[/ATTACH]

 

Any ideas?

Cheers

 

These should be the relevant bits from the build notes I put together recently.

 

 

 

I built mine using Ubuntu 16.04, which is the latest LTS release (supported for 5 years). Regular (non-LTS) releases only get support for 6 months iirc.

Edited July 10, 2017 by jthompson

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