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

Using GLPI to track and manage inventory assets


The way we use GLPI depends on our needs. The framework is flexible enough, and it ends up just as useful as we make it. Should we decide to use only 10 to 20 percent of its capabilities and features, then we might claim that GLPI isn't worth the time. It all depends on our requirements. This chapter focuses on describing the possibilities and features that GLPI sports. We then know where to find them and how to use them, if we want to.

Logging into the central web console gives us a welcome screen. This is customizable as well. We can select the kind of things we want to see inside personal views. Either way, the global view usually gives a sufficient idea of what has happened since our last login.

Check out the following screenshot for such an example:

We can find an up-to-date status of contracts, tickets, additions (new entries into the database), planning (remember—this is the scheduler), personal notes, and latest events.

In order to configure...