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

Diagnosing uncommon pitfalls—asking for help


We have all been there. Sometimes we might face such a weird situation that despite all of our efforts, we cannot solve it by ourselves. That's the beauty of communities and helping each other as more eyes can be more attentive to details and the know-how and experience is merged together. The OCS-NG site offers support forums that are active.

As the members of the community are not able to troubleshoot and debug on your setup and infrastructure, it is extremely important to provide the maximum amount of information you can. This means gathering all of the logfile outputs, including agents (those that are struggling), communication server logs, Apache logs, and even the configuration files. The specification details of your platform and version numbers are required.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of the community is from France. English for most people is their second if not third (or even more) language. This means their answers might not...