Manage your portal account and all your products. Get help, be heard by us and do your job better using our products. Get practical advice on managing IT infrastructure from up-and-coming industry voices and well-known tech leaders. Tested and verified to work on or with AHV, the Nutanix built-in hypervisor. The first step to gaining control of your IT inventory is establishing an up-to-date list of assets.
Instead of manually keeping lists, using software to track your hardware and software inventory can be much more time-efficient and accurate than using spreadsheets. The only constant in your server and application configurations is change. Without a change monitoring tool, it can be difficult to know what changes took place, or what the changes entailed. SolarWinds SPCB provides both IT inventory software and configuration monitoring features, helping you quickly see if hardware or software has been added, removed, or updated to a different version.
Additionally, you can see what changes were made and easily compare the new configuration to previous configurations within a centralized dashboard. IT inventory or asset management is a set of practices focused on tracking and managing business hardware and software, including related service level agreements SLAs and other contractual concerns.
Optimizing the way you manage inventory lists can help you more efficiently support lifecycle management for your device, service, and software inventory—which can play a significant role in increasing the effectiveness and extending the lifecycle of your IT assets. Using an IT asset tracking tool with hardware warranty expiration monitoring capabilities can help you ensure future purchases and procurement strategies are aligned with departmental goals and business needs.
IT inventory software streamlines asset management processes which enables you to correlate, track, and analyze changes to ensure optimal service and performance. This provides visibility into how physical assets like hardware, servers, and other devices can be directly tied to purchase orders, service level contracts, software applications, services, and other intangible assets. It enables you to look up the hardware and software associated with each workstation and device, while also helping to increase the traceability of your assets.
Inventory tracking tools offer an efficient means of tracking and analyzing system rosters, as well as the location, use, cost, add and expiration dates, and other business-relevant information for individual assets and components. Understanding the infrastructural relationships between assets can allow you to more effectively manage your inventory over the course of its lifecycle and reduce unnecessary expenses at the same time. This can lead to simpler auditing and reporting processes, as well, which can be useful for insurance purposes and tracking inventory depreciation.
In a digital world where efficiency is increasingly key to success, IT inventory management software is essential. These tools can help eliminate the need for making time-consuming manual updates to cumbersome spreadsheets after each incident or ownership update.
IT inventory software makes it easier to track your assets by allowing you to create detailed records about each of your assets, document maintenance timelines, and update assignments and location—all from a single convenient web platform. The best way to automate inventory discovery is through using appropriate software. Manually tracking and managing IT assets over the course of their lifecycles is time-consuming and inefficient. Automated inventory management tools can help to minimize the opportunities for manual mistakes and significantly increase the efficiency of management practices, which is especially important as your server hardware and software inventory grow.
A tool that automates necessary low-value operations such as inventory discovery becomes critical as the scope of business operations change and IT departments are tasked with provisioning resources to support the new infrastructure and setup.
For example, the Asset Inventory feature in SolarWinds SPCB is designed to simplify the process of inventory management, while still providing a wealth of detailed information. The asset auto-discovery tool, for instance, can provide services for physical assets and virtual network nodes, including:. Polling jobs repeat each day and can be rescheduled to run at different frequencies or during specific time periods to limit overtaxing CPU usage and ensure the load on polling engines is kept manageable.
By default, Asset Inventory also monitors the health of hardware assets—a capability you can use independently of polling as needed. Remember proactive monitoring solutions become essential as infrastructures increase in size and complexity.
Additionally, automated database server inventory tools, software inventory tools, and hardware tracking tools—when used in tandem with application monitoring software—can allow you to more easily access the configuration specs for different assets and components when troubleshooting infrastructural issues.
Hardware warranty expiration monitoring tools are likewise useful for determining when to phase out outdated devices or software. The inventory management tools included in SPCB can enable you to poll individual nodes or groups of nodes, allowing you to maintain a current server inventory with ease. Once the third-party agent software has been installed and configured, enabling Asset Inventory in bulk is as simple as running another Discovery.
The server inventory tools will likewise poll nodes daily to keep assets lists current. The use of dedicated tools in SPCB can allow you to more easily and accurately maintain current inventory without using archaic methods, such as validating the inventory list in sheets or analogue form. SPCB automatically scans your networked environment for new assets. You can also leverage more than 1, community-created SAM monitoring templates or create your own.
To add the name of a specific file, click the New button to display the New File dialog box, and enter the name of the file.
Wildcard characters are acceptable. Then click OK to return to the File Collection tab. This option lets you identify how much total file data can be collected from the client during a software inventory cycle.
This value can be as large as 20 MB. Keep in mind, especially if you are using wildcard characters, that collected files can generate a larger amount of additional network traffic than the basic software inventory.
Click on the Inventory Names tab, shown in Figure , to standardize the names of the company or product that are displayed when you view software inventory information. Sometimes, as companies update their software applications or create new versions, the developers include variations on the company's or the product's name in the header information included in the program executable.
Of course, when you view the software inventory, the products will be sorted and displayed according to each variation of the company or product name. This can make it difficult for you to find all versions of the product.
This example lists several variations of the company name for Microsoft—Microsoft Corp. Select which name type you want to standardize; your choices are Product or Company.
Enter the name you want to be displayed on the product information screen, and click OK to return to the Inventory Names tab. Enter the names that have been inventoried by the Software Inventory Client Agent that you want standardized to the display name you entered in the Display Name section and click OK to return to the Inventory Names tab.
If the file changes at all on the client, the Software Inventory Client Agent will collect it again at the next cycle. By default, SMS will retain the last five copies of the file that were collected. Think about that. At 1 MB per file and five collected copies per client, for clients you would require 5 GB of storage space just for your collected files.
Not pretty! Obviously, you would not use this as an alternative backup process. However, it can be used to look for files that should not be on a client, like a game executable.
The number of such collected files ought to be significantly smaller. All collected files are kept in the database for 90 days before they are aged out. Look for the value Maximum Collected Files , and change it as desired. When you enable the Software Inventory Client Agent, you are making a change to the site properties, and the site's site control file Sitectrl.
In the same directory, the client offer file is also updated to indicate that the Software Inventory Client Agent needs to be installed on all SMS clients for the site. Thirty minutes after the Software Inventory Client Agent is started, the first complete inventory is collected from the client as specified by the inventory and collected files options you specified.
A complete default inventory will generate a software information file of about KB in size, depending on what you told the agent to scan for and how much data it found. The initial inventory is also passed to the CAP and then to the site server. Like hardware inventory, subsequent software inventory cycles generally report only changes to the inventory. Therefore, you can expect a corresponding amount of network traffic associated with the installation one time , with the first complete inventory one time , and with subsequent delta inventories according to your schedule.
As with hardware inventory, the schedule you choose should reflect the frequency with which you need to collect or update the inventory record of your clients. If your clients have fairly standard software installations and do not make or are not allowed to make substantial changes on their own, you could collect inventory less frequently—say, once a week or even once a month.
If your client computers keep changing in terms of software installations, updates, and uninstalls, you may need to report changes to the inventory more frequently—perhaps once a day or once every 12 hours. The more frequent the inventory is collected, the more potential network traffic will be generated.
Like the Hardware Inventory Client Agent, the Software Inventory Client Agent will continue to run and report inventory regardless of whether a user is actually logged onto the client.
Double-click on the applet to display the Systems Management Properties window, and click on the Components tab. Earlier in this chapter, we talked about the possibility of a client being assigned to more than one SMS site and the effect on hardware inventory. Recall that in this situation, SMS will follow predefined rules to determine which agent properties from which SMS site take precedence over the others. If software inventory is enabled on any one site, it will be installed on the client.
Inventory frequency is determined by the principal site. If, however, the principal site has disabled software inventory, inventory will still be collected according to the schedule of the next site that has software inventory enabled. To set the principal site, open the Systems Management applet on the client in question and select the Sites tab to view a list of all the SMS sites to which the client has been assigned.
Unless the client is a member of multiple SMS sites, only one site will appear here. If the list contains multiple entries, the entry at the top of the list is designated the principal site. To change the principal site, use the Move Up and Move Down buttons.
In addition, the Software Inventory Client Agent will report on all file types configured on all the sites to which the client is assigned—that is, if site A reports on. EXE files and site B reports on. EXE and. DLL files. The same is true for collected files specified in multiple sites. The amount of data collected and reported will represent the highest level of detail specified at any of the sites.
Now let's explore the software inventory collection process in more detail. This process is illustrated in Figure Remember that the inventory collection process is the same for both bit and bit clients.
Each subsequent inventory generates a delta file, containing the details for only those inventory properties that have changed since the last interval. When a complete inventory file has been generated, Sinv For subsequent inventory cycles, this delta file will have an. SID software inventory delta extension. Copy Queue Manager renames the file with a unique filename but retains the file extension. SIC or. At this point, the software inventory process is complete on the client.
SIC and. You can also schedule the operation in client settings. After you enable software inventory and the clients run a software inventory cycle, the client sends the information to a management point in the client's site. The management point then forwards the inventory information to the Configuration Manager site server, which stores the information in the site database. Create queries that return devices with specified files.
Create query-based collections that include devices with specified files. Run reports that provide details about files on devices. Use Resource Explorer to examine detailed information about the files that were inventoried and collected from client devices. When software inventory runs on a client device, the first report is a full inventory.
Subsequent reports contain only delta inventory information.
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