Comments on: 36 Items To Capture For Practical Hardware Asset Tracking

By: Jared Younker

Jared Younker — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:06:24 +0000

Greetings Ramesh,

Just wanted to thank you for writing the above article. I was just promoted to Senior Network Administrator last week, and my first assigned task was to create an extensively detailed company inventory. Your tips are incredibly helpful, thanks for allowing us to learn from your process!

By: Will Barrowes

Will Barrowes — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:19:54 +0000

I am with CG4 Solutions Inc. We provide Asset Tracking Software (www.cg4.com) that uses traditional barcodes, handheld scanners, and a web-based central server using a SQL database. I was just reading through the postings and thought I would add a couple of comments. Our customers spend most of their time tracking IT Assets. The list of fields provided looks comprehensive. We see most of those with almost every customer. Regardless of the types of assets you are tracking, using a spreadsheet is painful. My background is corporate finance and when in that role I would use a spreadsheet to inventory assets. I hated doing it, just like Mark Hoff and the others mention. I would always move that task to the bottom of the stacks on my desk hoping it would go away. For the last eight years I have been working with CG4 and I can say that with the strength of the mobile component of our web based asset tracking software I would have done my inventory work quickly and with a half smile on my face knowing that the painful inventory via spreadsheet was no longer a part of my life.

Mark Hoff, I would be interested to have you learn a bit about what we offer and have you give us feedback. With having your head into so many asset tracking systems, I would value your opinion. You can email me at will.barrowes@cg4.com. We might be able to make it worth your time.

By: Mark Hoff

Mark Hoff — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:49:54 +0000

You wrote: “Don’t get trapped into researching the best available asset tracking software.” I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen the insides of many asset tracking systems (nearly one-hundred at last count.) These include a great many of the large, medium, and small commercial offerings, as well as a range of open-source and freely-available packages. Not a single one of them stands out. And most of the time that you’re spending researching, you could be spending doing.

Asset tracking is a pain in the *ss. No matter how you do it, it’s dirty, tedious, unglamorous work. And it’s mostly maintenance work. No one wants to do it. But everyone wants it done–and done well.

By: Abhi

Abhi — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:10:09 +0000

Excellent stuff. Documenting is really good thing. But I hate spending my time in documenting the inventory.
Rather I would like to use tools like OCS inventory.
Do we know any tool that can be used as non-root user to document the system details ?

By: Ajith Edassery

Ajith Edassery — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:01:56 +0000

This is a pretty exhaustive list. I wonder whether there are not tracking tools (including inventory, license expiry, floating license usage, access tracking, warranty/service terms/tenure etc) or software available for automating all these?

Anyways, thanks for the post

Cheers,
Ajith

By: sg

sg — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:39:11 +0000

“Sysadmins hates to document anything. They would rather spend time exploring cool new technology than documenting their current hardware and environment.”

—> why not combine fun with necessity? Ocs inventory allows you to play with new open source technology and in the process you get a database of everything that is connected to the network (and has the ocs inventory agent running on it), without having to do it manually.
That database can then be queried (eg give me all machines with less than x mb ram, … ) or integrated (e.g. with arpwatch: compare known hosts in inventory with hosts on the network, alert if unknown hosts)

If you want to you can also add own properties like warranty dates to the ocs inventory database.