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

Working with the inventory


As obvious as it seems, we have built and want to maintain a full-fledged inventory platform with the ability to gather and store data in a centralized solution. Ultimately, that is the goal of inventorying and asset management. The OCS-NG agents, are pulling out a huge amount of information that is stored in the central database. Through the OCS-NG web interface we have a user-friendly manner to access and work with this data.

Imagine how hard it would be to generate SQL queries inside some database interpreter. That would not really be a seamless inventory interface. The web interface does all of these behind the scenes. We just need to learn its functions and features.

Besides those five query functions that we talked about earlier, which are present on the blue toolbar on the left, the inventory is much more capable of performing other functions as well. As mentioned earlier, every time we click on a hyperlink, such as a hostname, a new browser tab is opened...