Chapter 01

1 Introduction
1.1 Background
How much time and effort does your IT department spend on auditing a growing number of PCs, hardware and software, upgrade planning, licenses tracking, calculation of infrastructure costs and other related tasks? If you want to increase the efficiency and find a time-saving solution, try network inventory, which may become your indispensable assistant assigned to care about audit of your network computers. When you need to collect detailed PC inventory information for computers in your local network the only effective approach is to use automatic computer inventory system. Manual audit is very complicated and time-consuming if you would like to get detailed, quality inventory report. Network inventory management is a must for efficient control of your computer and software asset inventory. An automated inventory is the only way to be truly up to date IT systems change continuously during their lifecycle. Hardware components may be added or removed, software installed or uninstalled. Even in small IT networks, there will always be growth and change and managing IT inventory manually is practically impossible. Most hardware items in your business, such as servers, desktops, laptops, and networking equipment and appliances, should be part of your inventory. This is especially true for hardware operated under the terms of a contractual agreement, such as a lease or a maintenance service contract. In fact, many asset management applications let you combine various properties of an asset into one database application. In terms of prioritization, the more mission-critical assets should receive the closest scrutiny. The same goes for software. For example, you want to be sure that your business ERP system software stays fully compliant with the terms of your licensing agreement with the vendor. In fact, software inventories and protection from damaging liability go hand in hand. Software companies take an active interest in protecting their intellectual property and in most cases (especially giants such as Microsoft and Oracle) have the financial resources to go the distance in a legal dispute. The last thing you need is a looming lawsuit because employees in your business installed unlicensed copies of software applications.

So Automated Network Inventory be helpful in our day-to-day work, It collects various information about software, hardware and application licenses from remote computers and gives fast and exact answers to questions like:

How many desktops have XP? On which computers is Photoshop CS3 installed? Which computers are running under Linux and have less than 1 Gb RAM? Are the available software licenses sufficient or are any additional ones required? How much extra hardware is required for the operating system upgrade? Which desktops lack free space on their hard drives? Are there any unwanted files like .AVI and who has them? Which PCs are equipped by DVD?

1.2 Motivation
Chosen by industry leaders, small business, government, non-profit organizations and educational institutions, Network Inventory is one of the most necessity audit, because most of the network inventory software are used manual data entry methodology. So always these softwares casus to produce more errors on inventories, because of manual data entry. So I try to overcome these problems by achieving following targets.

Collecting information from remote PCs without having to install clients on them. Scan of every PC takes just a few minutes and runs invisibly for the user.

By no special requirements for software or network configuration - you can run it from any PC with network administrator's credentials.

Wide and detailed scope of information extracted from remote computers. It includes hundreds of parameters - everything required for inventorying: from OS version, processor and memory information to list of installed fonts and system uptime.

Intuitive data representation, which helps you navigate through collected data. Easyto-use interface allows you to get results with just a few mouse clicks.

Powerful reporting and exporting tools make asset report creation effortless - you just need to select what information and what computers to include.

1.3 Goals
The goal of inventory management is to have a complete, up-to-date and accurate view of all network components, including PCs, servers, printers, hubs, routers, switches and software, etc. At a minimum, IT inventory management should tell you the device class and whats installed on the device. For any given time frame, inventory management provides the actual state of all infrastructure components. This means that you know what you have and where it is located? Across the entire enterprise network. According to my main goal, it consists with two main sub goals. Those objectives can simply be listed out as follows.

Software Inventory Information about software assets installed on your network computers gives you a

strong advantage in your everyday work. Having software audit information, you can easily improve security and OS health control as well as detect unwanted applications and applications that require an upgrade. License software purchases. tracking features take the guess work out of

The following data reported by software inventory module help you

save your efforts for coping with software-related problems in your organization Basic OS information: name, version, installation date, service pack and hot fixes. System and environment settings: services, running processes, shares, startup commands, and scheduled tasks. List of installed applications, including: name, version, publisher, installation path and installation date. Aggregated software audit information for entire network: total number of installations for every OS and application, and the list of PCs they are installed on. Software license summary for entire network: total number of available, used and required licenses for every application. Changes between scans: list of freshly installed and uninstalled applications. Custom scan results, useful for detecting specific applications: existence of a particular file, registry entry or service.

Hardware Inventory

How often are we unable to make right decision simply because we lack information? When using Network Inventory, you will have up-to-date hardware inventory information to take effective decisions. You will be able to plan upgrades more accurately and to minimize upgrade costs by identifying how the replaced devices could be reused. Many hours can be spared in case of problems with particular hardware since you will know exactly what PCs require your attention. The following reported data and features help you to keep hardware assets under control: Basic information: processor, motherboard, graphic card, hard drive, CD/DVD drive and network card. Extended information (if available): manufacturer, model name, serial number and manufacturing date. Settings and parameters depending on the hardware type: number of memory banks, maximum and installed memory capacity, total and free space on the hard drive, MAC address, graphics resolution, etc. Aggregated hardware inventory summary for entire network: total quantities of each hardware type, list of PCs where it is used. Query reports with custom conditions: for example, PCs with 1 GB of memory, PCs lacking free space on the hard drive, etc. Report, Chart and Export Tools It's not enough to just collect network asset information: tons of collected data also needs to be transformed into different reports. A short summary will be fine for your boss but your IT department needs a detailed report. Our IT asset management solution saves you from redundant paperwork and weekends wasted for report preparation.