Ask Slashdot: What Asset Tracking Software Do You Recommend? 137
grahamsaa writes: I work for an organization that has a number of physical assets, as well as presence in multiple data centers. On the DC side, there are a number of specific things we need to track (one thing we want to be able to account for is how much power do we need for each rack). On the office side, our needs are more basic. We need to be able to tag and track laptops, workstations, monitors, etc. I would like to use a single system for all of this, but have yet to find something that will work well on the office side and the data center side. Free/open source solutions are preferred, but we're prepared to spend money on a commercial solution if it meets our needs. What would you recommend?
Easy (Score:4, Funny)
Access+Javascript+MongoDB+Visual Basic.
If you manage to use this system, tracking laptops will be a piece of cake in comparison.
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Bah use wordpress
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might as well stick with the current Excel spreadsheet.
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I was going to say spend a million or two on a "enterprise solution tailored to fit your needs" that never actually works like you wanted, but middle management loves because the salesman took them out for drinks, then spend another half-million on training so that everybody gets up to speed. Then after wasting time for 6 months, use some wacky combination of access and excel that lives on some shared drive *somewhere*, Finally give up and scrap the whole idea when a new operations director comes in and has
Re:Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Pen and notebook until all that is ready.
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I wrote my own initially for our team. I wrote it so any team could use it if they wanted but it is written from a Unix server perspective. With it being adopted more and more, I'm rewriting it in a few places to accommodate other teams (networking: we have devices not servers) and have incorporated a changelog management process and server creation process along with a few extra specialized bits for other team requirements (web site certificate management with notifications prior to expiration). It's autom
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For the company, sure.
Re: Easy (Score:2)
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I was going to say spend a million or two on a "enterprise solution tailored to fit your needs" that never actually works like you wanted, but middle management loves because the salesman took them out for drinks, then spend another half-million on training so that everybody gets up to speed. Then after wasting time for 6 months, use some wacky combination of access and excel that lives on some shared drive *somewhere*, Finally give up and scrap the whole idea when a new operations director comes in and has a NEW enterprise solution lined up from his good buddy at yet another company.
You forgot about the part where you pull in HR and make them advertise for an unrealistic amount of experience in this overpriced "solution", mixed, of course with a long and unlikely laundry list of "must-have" skills. To which a number of offshore outfits will immediately respond claiming that they have all this and certs to boot all for an Everyday Low Price, followed by hiring of a bunch of clueless entry-level people who can barely speak English.
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I prefer Excel spreadsheet accessible via Sharepoint.
Importance Of Process (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference: the people and process. When it comes to asset tracking in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment (e.g., not an Amazon warehouse), no tool is going to replace good process and procedure since there will be error-prone and lazy humans in the process. You need to get religious about these sorts of things if you want them to work. No nifty tool will substitute.
My two cents.
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Agree. My system uses scripts and snmp to gather data and is open for use by everyone. The applications folks can enter their application information, customers, and outage requirements, the server/device folks can enter their hardware information, and even shipping and receiving are part of the process and receive automatic emails when hardware is incoming due to a break-fix.
[John]
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Asset tracking is not about tools or the process it is about the person. A good asset managers will be able to do a great job with a ream of paper, a pencil, a sharpener, a clip board, a hole punch and a folder. A crap asset manager with all the best tools imaginable will do a shit job and that is it. An asset manager that is looking for software to do their job for them is a bad asset manager.
Managing assets is about keeping track of their effective use, losses, repairs, working life, theft, durability,
Lansweeper (Score:1)
Hello OP,
You should give LanSweeper a try, it has a bunch of useful tools and automatic reports, plus you can create custom reports for nearly anything. We've used it for over a year now, it's a relatively cheap solution for incredible flexibility. It's been invaluable for us.
Cheers
nLyte (Score:2, Insightful)
nLyte is what we use. it sounds like it would fit your needs.
Excel (Score:2, Insightful)
You are either a small company, in which case Excel suffices, or you are a large company, in which case there is no single product that fits all your requirements which makes Excel the best compromise.
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It's definitely painful if you're an OSS zealot. To the more objective person it's a clever bit of satire.
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"Satire," sure. "Clever" is much too generous, though. Poe's Law doesn't even apply.
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That depends on where you sit. I had a guy here once try to push OSS on me with claims of all the money I'm wasting without it. He doesn't even know what I use the commercial software for. I wish I could say my experience with him was unique around here.
Righteousness does not excuse extremism.
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That depends on where you sit.
Sure, if you're sitting in a 4th grade classroom, it's probably gut-busting.
Righteousness does not excuse extremism.
True, but neither does it make "hurrr, this iz yoo"-type caricature "clever satire."
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No, it's the spot-on criticism of their behaviour that makes it clever satire. Judging from the moderation that comment recieved, he got a bull's eye.
Compatibility with accounting (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system. Find out what your accounting needs are ahead of time. Your accountants will need to have a fixed asset [wikipedia.org] list for tax and reporting purposes. This is THE most important function of an asset tracking system. Whatever you do make damn sure it is easily compatible with the needs of the accounting department. Otherwise you are costing the company money and making life needlessly difficult. It may be that your accountants have modest needs like in my company - we do ours directly in our accounting software and that's fine for us. But if you are considering specialty software to keep track then chances are that you should be including your finance and accounting people in this conversation before you install anything.
Re:Compatibility with accounting (Score:4, Interesting)
> Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system.
Oh, my, yes. This. Getting buy-in from the people who actually do the work, so that they know why you selected certain features, is incredibly helpful. This applies to accounting, VOIP, trouble ticket systems, Wikis, email, and any other IT supported system. And the people on the ground may know of critical features or flaws that their own supervisors are simply unaware of or which get "summarized" out of the critical feature list at the several dozens of meetings before such a project is actually implemented.
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The problem though is if it's easy for the accountants but difficult to use by the staff (like Magic), you'll only have the basic asset information and we'll continue to use what works for us. You need to manage assets for tax and reporting purposes. I need to know what my system consists of, who are the internal and external customers, SLA's, maintenance windows, and even track problems for trending analysis.
[John]
Consider needs of all users - not just operations (Score:2)
The problem though is if it's easy for the accountants but difficult to use by the staff (like Magic), you'll only have the basic asset information and we'll continue to use what works for us.
The amount of information that accounting needs is generally pretty modest (asset ID, description, cost, location, acquisition date). But you ignore the needs of your accounting department at your company's peril. You don't have to favor any particular department's needs but you damn well ought to be working closely with accounting when deciding what to use when it comes to asset tracking. Accounting WILL need that information for tax and reporting purposes. If an audit occurs this information WILL be looked at. I've seen plenty of companies make the foolish mistake of picking some tracking software based solely on the operational needs without considering how it affects other departments.
Re:Compatibility with accounting (Score:4, Informative)
And to someone who works in a data center, the most important things are tracking power draw, heat dissipation, and cooling requirements.
There is no one solution that fits all needs, and every user (like you) is going to claim that their needs are "priority one."
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Sure there is. A fucking spreadsheet with versioning.
What matters to a company is money (Score:3)
And to someone who works in a data center, the most important things are tracking power draw, heat dissipation, and cooling requirements.
Sorry but no. The financial aspects of asset tracking are at the end of the day paramount in a corporation. Those are important second order considerations as far as the business is concerned. Management of the company will only care about those things insofar as they affect profitability.
There is no one solution that fits all needs, and every user (like you) is going to claim that their needs are "priority one."
Given that the fixed asset list determines the value of assets on the balance sheet and the amount of depreciation, profits and taxes, I feel quite confident in claiming that the most important function of asset trackin
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You're both wrong. Those things are equally important because you can't do business without handling both your finances and your business competently. Sometimes, there are multiple items of paramount importance. Welcome to the English language, may I take your coat, gov'nor?
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You overstate and overestimate your importance.
1. Customers
2. Sales/Marketing
3. Customer support
4. Product development and production
Those are the "make or break" of a successful business, not the overhead/expense of accounting.
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Bullshit. There are many reasons for tracking assets, and different information required for the tracking, which is the crux of the original article. Accounting for depreciations is only one of those requirements, and no more important than any other.
If the accounting department were doing their job properly, they would already have a system in place for tracking receipt of new equipment and subsequent depreciation. They would not be relying on an asset tracking/inventory system to do the job for them
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How about just using the accounting system. If the accountants already need to keep track of what's going in and out for tax purposes, then you might as well use what they have. The benefit is that accountants are a lot more anal about getting these things right, IT folks only half-ass these things because, well, it's not our job to keep track of what people have purchased, as long as it works.
Accounting isn't simple (Score:2)
Why aren't you people replaced entirely by computers yet?
That's as stupid a question as asking why engineers haven't been replaced by computers yet. I happen to be both an engineer and an accountant and I do both as a part of my job running a manufacturing company. Anyone who would ask that question simply doesn't understand or is willfully ignorant of what it is that accountants do for a living.
If you think that is possible to get rid of accounting with automation go ahead and try. If you succeed there is a Nobel prize in it for you. (not joking or even being
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Some (such as yourself) have this naive notion that accounting is a simple programmatic task of paper shuffling and that is completely false.
Yes, it won't be that way until we shoot all the lawyers. They're the ones responsible for all the blood-sucking, money-grubbing leech laws that make accounting so complicated.
Fucking A Slashdot, this comment ain't gonna get any better with age. Let me submit the fucking prick already.
Insufficient data is the problem - not lawyers (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it won't be that way until we shoot all the lawyers. They're the ones responsible for all the blood-sucking, money-grubbing leech laws that make accounting so complicated.
Has (almost) nothing to do with lawyers or the lack thereof. Even seemingly basic things like how to classify transactions appropriately is not a trivial task. Let me give you an example. What is an appropriate useful lifetime for a milling machine so that you can determine a depreciation schedule? There is no single correct answer to this question. We have rules about it but the rules are just generalisms not actually correct in most cases. Another example. What is the current market value of building you purchased 20 years ago? You can guess at the answer but you cannot know for certain unless you sell it. So you either have to guess or you have to use an answer from 20 years ago that you know is wrong.
Accounting can be made more complicated by the lawmakers but it isn't a primary driver for that. A lot of the difficulty is simply in trying to answer questions for which there is insufficient data to make a correct answer.
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Has (almost) nothing to do with lawyers or the lack thereof.
Sigh.
What is an appropriate useful lifetime for a milling machine so that you can determine a depreciation schedule?
This is only relevant because of overcomplicated tax laws, which are the result of too many lawyers, like I said. The law should not give a shit about depreciation.
What is the current market value of building you purchased 20 years ago?
That's a highly subjective question, it's not simply accounting. It's politics. And then we get back to lawyers.
Complication (Score:2)
Sigh.
A very eloquent retort.
This is only relevant because of overcomplicated tax laws, which are the result of too many lawyers, like I said. The law should not give a shit about depreciation.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. Complication in accounting can be in response to legal issues but legal issues (and lawyers specifically) are NOT the primary driver of it in most cases. The primary source of difficulty in accounting is simply incomplete data followed closely by the fact that there are multiple answers to many accounting issues. Classification or transactions and valuation of assets and liabilities is frequently difficult, ambiguous or even impossible to
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Complication in accounting can be in response to legal issues but legal issues (and lawyers specifically) are NOT the primary driver of it in most cases.
Who do you think writes legislation?
It IS a highly subjective question and that subjectivity has NOTHING to do with politics or lawyers. The value of a building is what someone is willing to buy it for. It's subjective after a sale
In fact, it is subjective any time it is not actually being sold, and attempting to observe it changes it. How very QM.
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I'd have thought the answer was because people didn't select an asset tracking application that was compatible with accounting needs.
What accounting is good for. (Score:2)
Bookkeeping might be done by computers, assuming there's someone around to type in the numbers.
The purpose of accounting is to tell you how the company is doing.
Here's my example. You're a publisher, and you have a warehouse of paper books. Lost of copies of few best-sellers, and a lot of others. Now how much is that inventory worth?
The easy way is just do add up the wholesale price of all those copies and add them together.
That would probably be dead wrong. The best-sellers might sell that much, but th
Racktables (Score:4, Informative)
Free, open source, and easy to use. (Score:4, Informative)
We had to go homegrown... (Score:2)
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My system uses a WinForm front end that makes WMI calls to devices on a configurable IP Address range (the range can be set at run time or ranges can be stored in the database to quickly re-scan specific sites). It collects all the device model information and also lists the installed software. There i
I recommend... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Apparently you've never been tasked with implementing an asset management regime. The only direction I received was "we need to start doing asset management" and questions like "how do we define an asset" and "what are you hoping to get out of this" never got answered by any of the stakeholders. Each team now has some spreadsheets...
Someone at subby's shop failed an audit, now we're seeing the results.
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further, for starters,
make a spreasheet with
modelling each view
- accounting and ops were the two already mentioned
- all the views your peers and org already knoe that they will need
going down the page,
keep all the item info in one column
refine the views as you fill in mock-data
to prototype one or two of each sort of asset you must/can/will/might/want to track
clarify the item types and unique attributes
along with the views
as you build up a prototype.
do this now.
deliver it to your self.
print and sleep on it.
r
Active WIFI Tags (Score:2)
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For computers that are on the network could they remote in to the computer they're searching and set it playing a full-screen video of flashing lights with "Call IT you've won a prize!" in neon text??
Won't work for headless computers.
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Worth taking a look at ServiceNow. (Score:3)
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Under the radar (Score:1)
I repeatedly wrote and used a fairly big pile of scripts, over various platforms. Shell, but mostly Powershell on Windows, starting from when it was just available.
It worked wonders: I made information gathering scripts to scrape ALL available sources, dynamically queried from the devices, or static from other sources, including whatever crooked enterprise solution was already wasting electricity. I had them run one a or a few times per day generating raw results.
Then a second layer of scripts would make
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I work for a company that has 17 locations (Score:4, Interesting)
I do not work for the company that makes the product I am recommending, nor do I have any affiliation, relationship, association or any other connection to them except the one where I give them some money every year and they let me use their product in return.
I use and recommend a product called Lansweeper. The cost is very reasonable, uses WMI, and SNMP for asset scanning. It can do everything it's designed to do without an agent or you can deploy a small, non-resident agent if bandwidth considerations are critical. It stores all it's information in a standardized SQL format (can use MS free SQL express) if you don't already own SQL in your environment. It's reporting capabilities are fantastic. The interface is all web enabled and can run on it's proprietary web hosting or can use IIS.
We pay $1500 US once a year and the license allows us to run as many scanning servers as we need. There are no limits on the number of nodes that can be scanned or data that can be stored. Maint is so easy you can have a low level tech manage the thing. And because of the standardized data structure, several of our other organizations pull data from it daily. Our ticketing system (Service Now) has regular reporting and direct ties into the lansweeper database. Security is not the primary focus because it is meant to be entirely internal with no public interface. however you can limit access in a very granular way using AD security groups or individual ID. It scans MAC, Linux, switches, routers, cisco gear, VOIP, windows workstations and servers, you name it. It also has a fairly robust software management component although we don't rely on that set of features as much as we could.
We've been running it in my company for over three years now and even though we have SCCM, Service Now, Sailpoint and a number of other products that are critical for very niche requirements, everyone in the IT organization that has need to gather and maintain asset management uses this product and I do overhear them talk about it with respect, especially when you consider the cost. Not going to link to their site but you can easily google Lansweeper to get there. The company is out of Belgium I believe and I found them by asking questions in the BSA forums.
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MS System Center or Spiceworks (Score:1)
Tracking assets? (Score:2)
Just try to do better than these guys [reuters.com].
Microsoft Office - Excel and/or Access... (Score:2)
Free/open source solutions are preferred, but we're prepared to spend money on a commercial solution if it meets our needs. What would you recommend?
Microsoft Office - Excel and/or Access...
A very small shell script (Score:2)
Well, a very small perl script would probably make more sense, but shell will do. Barcode all the rooms, step 1. Barcode all the equipment, step 2. Now run around scanning everything, scan the room on the way in and the way out. A small script can validate your data, make sure you scanned each room twice and diddle the file if not. Then another small script, making the script slightly larger, or a reporting tool can generate your report. You should be able to get this data into a format that will go into an
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Why use barcodes? Why not use RFID tags instead?
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Why use barcodes? Why not use RFID tags instead?
Because barcodes are more reliable than RFID. If you want more data than you can put in a 2D barcode, use a 3D one.
Jolly Asset Track (Score:1)
My company has been using a program called Asset Track for the last 14 months and have been happy with it. We were able to import our existing fixed asset spreadsheets and connect it up with our SQL Server database. We have it on a couple of desktops where we print bar code labels and use it on a couple of Surface Pro tablets for running inventory. We've started testing RFID labels as well. Our needs are pretty basic but it works great for what we use it for. I believe it is Windows only.
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Asset Tracker for RT (Score:2)
I highly recommend using RT [bestpractical.com] for tickets, and installing a plugin called Asset Tracker [github.com]. You can have multiple types of assets with different fields for each asset, link assets in tickets, use REST or their command line tool for automated queries/updates, and much more. It is all open source, modular, and very easy to modify.
A bit tedious but very useful (Score:2)
I use ipplan, check it out
http://sourceforge/projects/ip... [sourceforge]
http://iptrack.sourceforge.net... [sourceforge.net]
The perfect solution! (Score:4, Informative)
It's very clear that this is a mission-critical application need.
I recommend a clustered Oracle database with no less than four 8-core Wintel servers having at least 1 TB of RAM on each system along with 2 TB hard drives with a RAID 5 cluster and heartbeat connection between each pair of servers. Since we all know that California is a goner when the big one hits, you clearly need a RT (real-time, for you noobs!) connection with the same configuration located on the other side of the country. In fact, if you're a multi-national then its advisable to take a tax writeoff and host yet another same configuration in fscking Ireland too!
If that doesn't get you a renewable annual budget and a job-for-life then you need to become a manager and outsource the whole fscking thing to India where they'll do the work for minimum wage (what's that, $0.10/hour?) and you can manage it locally and report to the Board each year of all the hard work that you do.
Or just use a sqlite database with a small front-end configuration and Bob's your Uncle.
RT by BestPractical (Score:2)
It's open-source, but you can contract with them to do support and setup. The asset management plugin [bestpractical.com] is easy to add and works great.
Incredibly customizable as well. They also have an incident response module [bestpractical.com] that may be worthwhile to look at if you're managing multiple datacenters.
Far more important question: (Score:2)
A far more important question is do you already fully understand exactly what data you need to log and keep? That data will define your final solution.
Is the data updated by one person? Or by multiple people where a simple file based solution could cause people to override each other's stuff?
Is the data updated dynamically by scanning which devices are present on the network and marking stale devices?
Do you know exactly what data you want to track? (just serial numbers, or also makes and models etc)
Do you k
LANDesk Asset Lifecycle Manager (Score:1)
GLPI: Free IT And Asset Management Software. (Score:1)
GLPI [glpi-project.org]: Free IT And Asset Management Software.
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I've been meaning to give that one a trial. Has anyone used it?
What about OCS-NG?
Sigh. This was solved in 1999. (Score:1)
Once upon a time, a company called Tangram Enterprise Solutions, Inc. created a product named Asset Insight that was the first enterprise-scale tool for IT asset tracking (circa 1996). Other tools, like LAN Desk (mentioned in another post) were LAN-only tools, and focused on DOS / Windows. Tangram's AI was cross-platform (Windows, DOS, MacOS 1-9, MacOS X, Unix, Linux). And it was built to scale for enterprises, minimizing bandwidth use (both directions), not rely on non-WAN broadcast protocols, and storing
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Hmmm, after searching "Asset Insight", it looks like they're using the brand name for a service now. http://www8.hp.com/h20195/V2/G... [hp.com]
Suggestions (Score:1)
OpenDCIM http://www.opendcim.org/ [opendcim.org] is a decent datacenter management application. We've found it very useful for cataloging servers, devices, tape libraries, storage, etc. You can add asset tags, assign ownership to departments. You can also define connections between devices which can be very useful if you take the time to
SaaS? (Score:2)
This might be one area where SaaS is a legitimate option. With all the complex process and data management involved in Asset Management, you could benefit from a system that already has process and data standards defined, and where your organization's inexperience with this type of software isn't as big a liability.
BNC Asset Center (Score:1)
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Wife V1.0 (Score:2)