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

Maintaining a clean inventory: Solving common pitfalls and eliminating redundancies


One of the most common difficulties of inventories of all kinds is trying to keep them clean. Using the categorization mechanism, and automatically pulling out information can be more reliable than human-introduced data. However, algorithms cannot think rationally enough to comprehend some real world situations (unless they are programmed of course).

The eighth icon of the administrative toolbar on the right is called Duplicates. Let's go beyond that feature and understand how it works. Once loaded, it displays a summary.

The next screenshot shows the Redundancy function:

As we can see, there are some redundancy problems we need to address. The agents pull out relevant information that we can use to identify hosts uniquely, such as hostname, PC serial number, and MAC address. While the serial number of some hosts might be the same (manufacturers or OEMs don't fill in those appropriate fields correctly),...