Comments on: Looking for (preferably free) IT data center inventory apps.

Question: Looking for (preferably free) IT data center inventory apps.

neilkod — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:41:20 -0800

Looking for [ IT | data center ] inventory software. Ideally it will track all types of hardware imaginable, from the server room, to the desktop, to the mobile warrior. Cheap is good, free is better.

By: keep it tight

keep it tight — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:43:42 -0800

Check out SpiceWorks....

Free To boot!

By: k8t

k8t — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:47:09 -0800

This question has been asked A LOT before.

By: neilkod

neilkod — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:04:07 -0800

Sorry, did I need to qualify my question with "A search for data center inventory software yielded this but its 18 months old"?

k8t, care to provide some other examples?

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:17:52 -0800

Are you talking about asset tracking or autodiscovery?

By: neilkod

neilkod — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:28:48 -0800

Thanks for clarifying(?) GuyZero - Asset tracking should suffice but autodiscovery sounds pretty darn cool too!

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:55:36 -0800

There are autodiscovery products for servers in datacenters, but these products rarely do generic asset tracking.

I have never used it, but this seem cheap and meets the requriements.

By: jmd82

jmd82 — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:18:31 -0800

Spiceworks is targeted towards autodiscovery. It's free because it's financial income comes chiefly from working on an advertisement model. I haven't had much luck with it, but some people have. It discovers everything with an IP address well enough, but it has rarely has any clue what it discovered.

I've also tried Zenoss Core some. Though I haven't devoted enough time to see how well it works, it seemed a lot more powerful than SpiceWorks. It's packaged for linux, but there's a working VMWare package to try it out on.

Both products work from a web GUI interface so you can access it from any computer.

By: magic8ball

magic8ball — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:08:45 -0800

Have you tried Data Center Audit from azazia (azazia.com)

So I don't get in trouble for talking about what we use, let me just say I work at a 'major storage area network' hardware and software company that starts with an "H" :-) and we use it for managing our testing data center. It was easy to get pushed thru management because it wasn't ridiculously expensive like other apps out there. Plus our test lab environment is so dynamic that we couldn't afford to have agent based software, and none of our other developers trusted auto-discovery apps. So yeah it is manual entry, but it works for us and I like it because its pretty simple and NOT Java based! Can you tell I'm not a fan of java?

Besides, being a UNIX guy who poses as a software developer, I like the fact that it is web based and will run on Linux/UNIX and Windoze. What I like about it is that I can throw it on a laptop and I use it for site audits when I am sent out to customer sites and I need to perform a quick site audit or make a SAN diagram. I can export all views data into CSVs. Us UNIX folk tend to like the ability to export data to CSVs so we can perl or bash the data to death.

Anyway, that's my 'echo.'

:wq!ben