Chapter 1. Introduction to IT Inventory and Resource Management

In the past decade or so, we have begun to realize that computers are an indispensable necessity. They're around us everywhere, from the computers in our comfortable households to rovers from other planets. Currently, it is not uncommon at all to have more than a few dozen office computers and other pieces of IT equipment in the infrastructure of a small company that does nothing directly related to that specific area.

It should not surprise anyone that in the case of business environments, there has to be some streamlined inventory, especially when we consider that the network might have a total of several hundred, if not thousands, of workstation computers, servers, portable devices, and other office equipment such as printers, scanners, and other networking components.

Resource management, in its essence, when viewed from an IT perspective, provides a method to gather and store all kinds of information about items in our infrastructure. Later on it supports means to further maintain the said inventory. Moreover, it performs routine tasks based on the collected data such as generating reports, locating relevant information easily (like where is a specific memory module with the model number you're looking for), auditing the type of software installed on workstation computers, and more.

Our plan of action for this chapter is going to be pretty straightforward; we will analyze the IT inventorying needs and some general requisites when it comes to managing those assets. What's more, we'll be presenting the client-server model that is the underlying foundation on which most centralized management solutions are working. This is when OCS Inventory NG pops into the picture saving the day. Soon we will see why.

Throughout this book, we will adopting a step-by-step approach to build up our full-fledged OCS-NG, become familiar with its set of features, and excel in fulfilling our inventorying needs on all levels. Once the groundwork is done, we can further discuss more on best practices and learn how to troubleshoot confidently. Moreover, we can present a future possibility to empower what we've already done by building on top of it another asset management system that provides even more functionalities.

We will learn about OCS Inventory NG soon. For now, it's to realize that it's an open source project. No matter how successful a company is, open source solutions are always appreciated by the IT staff and management. Open source projects are preferred as long as they are actively developed, fairly popular, well documented, provides community support, and meets the needs of the company. Among others, open source projects end up modular and flexible.