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 8. Best Practices on Inventorying with OCS-NG

One of the most significant challenges of inventorying in the real world is keeping the inventory up-to-date and clean. We want inventories of all kinds—whether it is an IT assets inventory or the stock of a hypermarket retailer to be easy to work with. We do not want to keep an inventory just for the sake of having one. We would rather be able to pull out reports and carry out administrative tasks on the imported data. That is the key.

OCS Inventory NG marks most of the requirement checkboxes of our inventorying needs but, as with anything else in the world, there are best practices to follow. Sometimes the obvious tasks can be misleading, while the rather complex issues can be narrowed down to simple steps that make sense. In this chapter, we will shed a bit of light on these topics.

Furthermore, we need to look into the updating mechanism of OCS-NG inventory suite. The development team releases updates frequently (not that often, but...