Inventory Question

Rosco2382

Does anyone have a recommendation on how I can get an inventory of all the machines a company has? At the present moment it is just an excel file that isn't anywhere up to date and I was tasked to get it up to date and find a better tracking system for it.

FloOz

We used to use HP Service Manager before our dev team developed a new inventory management program. HPSM is worth checking out.

cyberguypr

First question should always be, what is your budget (if any)? Second, do you need a plain vanilla inventory system or a you looking into a more robust solution such as a CMDB? That will steer the discussion in the proper direction.

N2IT

Budget is huge like cyber mentioned. Also how is the system in place now, I understand it's very manual, however is that process accurate? Essentially are you looking to manage going forward or do you have to perform asset discovery? Discovery you could use SYDI or Powershell script to pull down the AD information. I would search for powershell and asset discovery if you need to find machines you have little to no information for.

Rosco2382

First off I apologize I posted in wrong section. Feeding my child and wasn't paying attention fully.

Well there is a budget but I am not 100% sure what it is. Its a bigger project than this task I was assigned. They are going from essentially a P2P network to a client/server setup. I think more so right now they are looking to see how many client PC's will be out there, and what PC's need to be upgraded, as this company wants to upgrade all of its XP machines to Windows 7 Pro/Windows 8 Pro.

So I guess in short I am looking to probably keep costs down but minimize a lot of manual work as well. So any and all input would be greatly appreciated.

Qord

Lansweeper and Spiceworks come to mind. Both are good pieces of software, and both are free.

datacomboss

I would use NMap.

cyberguypr

Sure Nmap an other tools can give you a glimpse, but Spiceworks and similar products give you a more in-depth view about the stuff on your network. You can see hardware and software easily down to installed apps and licenses. Other cool features include reporting, knowledge base, helpdesk ticketing system, and many others. I haven't used it in a while but I can only imagine it's way better than the one I used a few years ago.

If you want to jump to paid options you can look into ServiceDesk Plus, Sys Aid, Web Help Desk (Solar Winds), and others.

j23evan

Solarwinds I absolutely love. It's expensive, but you get what you pay for. Spiceworks is great as well. But they are more for traditional monitoring, though I suppose you could install a trial. I like Microsoft's Assessment Planning just to get a inventory of machines. Plus side is it's free, it can inventory physical and virtual devices, hosts, as well as other information. The free part is what I like. Though it works best if you stand up a new domain joined server for it (Which you can use an eval server license for) and credentials for a domain admin account. It will use AD, IP Range, Powershell Commandlets, and System Center credentials, depending on what you have in your environment. (I typically just use AD, an Address range, and the VMware root account). The reporting is skewed towards Microsoft Planning purposes, but will return all machines found in AD and via IP, what OS they are running, what applications are installed, hardware specs, last time the machine was seen.