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

Summary


This chapter delimited the kind of problems we can encounter. Soon enough, we get to know the ropes of possible issues of each component of the OCS-NG inventory solution and how to begin with troubleshooting in the respective situations. Logging is without any doubt the most important practice that any application can do. During this chapter, we presented where the logs are stored and how to take the magnifying glass on them.

We started out with probably the most common problem. We understood how to identify those computer clients that do not send in their inventory. When managing a significant number of machines—more than a dozen—we need to recognize when some of the devices are skipped. When we administer just a handful of clients, leakages are obvious.

The likelihood of running into issues with agents is evidently higher than with the main server backend. The reason for this is mostly because we have to deal with hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of agents on different machines...