Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Overview of this book

OCS Inventory NG is a cross-platform, open-source inventory and asset management solution. It brings more than plentiful features to the table to satisfy the business needs of small-to-large organizations with up to tens of thousands of computers. However, to put this inventory solution to optimum use requires a lot of skill.This book will lead you through the steps of implementing OCS-NG until you master working with it. This book aims at reducing efforts involved in resource management. The solution gives a robust foundation on top of which we can implement other third party applications, plugins, and much more.This book begins with the basics—it explains what IT inventorying needs are to be met in the real-world. Then, it covers a step-by-step approach to everything you need to know to set up and implement OCS-NG as a centralized inventory solution to meet all these requirements. It delves deeper into carrying out inventory tasks with every chapter.You will learn how to choose the best agent type and deployment method. We discuss the process of gathering inventory data and cover techniques for creating and deploying packages. You will also learn how to acquire added benefits with the use of plugins. We discuss best practices on inventorying and troubleshooting agent-related problems. The book presents real-world inventorying scenarios along with their solutions. You will basically learn how to use OCS-NG to get the most out of it.As a conclusion, if you want to learn about a free solution that fulfils inventorying necessities of the real-world, this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Keeping Pace with Version Updates—Glancing over the changelog of the Latest Release

Chapter 4. Finding your Way through OCS-NG Features

Our inventory platform is already set up by now. The central OCS-NG inventory server is up and running, and agents have been deployed throughout our network. No doubt, this means that we have plenty of entries in our database. Now, we need to learn to work with the inventory, how to perform administrative tasks, and how to get the most out of each function.

This chapter, deals with the user interface of the web-based OCS-NG admin and user console. Each toolbar item will be explained, and by the end of this chapter, we will know where to find the most common functionalities. At first, we log in using the default admin user, then we change its password (if we haven't done that already), and finally we set up more users. Once this is done, we can get into best practices and administrative tasks.

In this chapter, we will get to learn about the following:

  • Achieve familiarity with the user interface of the web administration console

  • Get around to...