Surely one of the toughest tasks of IT managers and even system administrators is keeping track of computers, network devices, software, and their configurations from the network. As long as there are only two computers, it’s acceptable to memorize everything, but what if your network totals several hundred if not thousands of items? No way! In this article we’ll present free IT inventory and resource management solutions to help us out.
No matter how successful an organization or company is, the managers and execs are always happy to hear about free and/or open-source alternatives to commercial software suites. Most of the time, there’s too much hassle involved in acquiring licenses, maintaining them, and on the top of all that, they all cost a fair price. Fortunately for us, the open-source community is “proactive” and there’s already a solution for our needs.
Moving on, IT inventory and resource management basically means using some way to centralize all of the information regarding devices that are connected to a network (say, a company intranet). By devices we mean computers, switches, routers, printers, notebooks, and such, including their configurations (e.g.; MAC addresses, IP addresses, the software installed on computers and the system specs of each one).
Throughout this article series we are going to present two applications. Each of them can be used individually, but there’s an ability to combine them, and that’s how we are going to end up with an amazing resource management and even software deployment client/server application that is centralized, secure and accessible via web browsers.
First of all, we will see what OCS Inventory NG is all about. It is a powerful inventory and package deployment system by itself. OCS stands for Open Computer and Software, while the NG on the end stands for Next Generation. It’s composed of four kinds of server components: a database, a communication server, a deployment server, and the administration console. And of course, agents are to be deployed on the systems.
The database centralization and software deployment of OCS Inventory NG is indeed powerful. However, its GUI (web-based interface) is, to be honest, quite simple and minimalist. This is where the second free product, GLPI, comes in. GLPI is an information resource manager with a spectacular administration web interface.
It has an impressive list of features and most importantly, it is able to import the data from OCS Inventory NG servers. This means that GLPI can work on top of OCS NG. This is what we’ve mentioned a bit earlier. Using both together expands their functions and turns them into a full-fledged feature-laden, totally complete, IT resource manager suite, including inventory, tracking, statistics, reporting, and software deployment capabilities.
