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

Useful scripts that make our everyday life easier


OCS Inventory NG by itself gives a huge portfolio of functions that help us during our daily routine tasks. One of the most frequent similar scenarios is generating reports of all kinds, depending on such criteria. The OCS-NG web interface does this natively, we just pick the elements (columns) and add the operators (and operands, if needed). The reports are generated right away. We can export the results of the inventory in comma-separated values (CSV).

This is all great when we want to manually create reports based on the requested criteria. For example, find all computers with less than 2GB of disk space or the ones with less than 1GB of RAM. We build up the query and we're done with it.

However, there are situations when we would like to be notified when a situation like this happens. In a real world implementation of this, let's imagine that we want to monitor the hardware specification changes/differences. The chances are quite slim...