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

Going beyond the retrieval mechanism


OCS Inventory NG was designed to work seamlessly in infrastructures with tens of thousands of hosts. The central management server would be overwhelmed without any doubt if it had to scan, query, and gather the inventory data from all of the hosts at the same time. That is why the developers implemented a task delegation mechanism. We explained this mechanism in a nutshell in Chapter 1, Introduction to IT Inventory and Resource Management. Basically, in order to alleviate the network load, the central server delegates the task of discovering other hosts to other clients that are known to be faithful and also the most active.

What do we mean by this? The client agents are becoming slaves of the management server. The server rates these agents based on how frequently they contact the server. These variables are called as Fidelity and Quality. We will explain these in greater detail a bit later. Right now, what matters is that the server tracks all the activities...