Inventory or asset management

chadd · Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2005 7:31 pm Post subject: Inventory or asset management

It would be great to see inventory, or asset management as part of cacti. A "real" view of what is out there via snmp and a "warehouse", or "spares" inventory - all kept in the database. If nothing like this exists I believe I will start work on this soon.

tommyj · Joined: 23 Jun 2005 Posts: 32 Location: Stockholm, Sweden

I'm really interested in some sort of asset management as well, any progress on this?

mobbylin · Joined: 27 Jul 2005 Posts: 5

I need this more functions

Etan

georger_br · Cacti User Joined: 04 Jul 2005 Posts: 63 Location: Brazil

The idea is good.
Just take care because asset management, event monitoring and notification etc, all have a lot of underlying complexity and end up taking a life of their own if you push the idea far enough. It can be done: Thold is an example of a good add-on.
You can get ideas from Network Monitoring Software (http://www.network-management-tool.org/), Network Management Center (http://network-management-center.com/index.asp), GLPI (http://glpi.indepnet.org/?lang=en), WINventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net/), JFFNMS (http://www.jffnms.org/), Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) and Big Brother (http://www.bb4.org/). Trouble ticket systems include Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/), RT (http://www.bestpractical.com/), and osTicket (http://www.osticket.com/).
Good luck. Regards,

Georger

cigamit · Posted: Mon Aug 15, 2005 9:46 am Post subject: Re: Inventory or asset management

tommyj · Joined: 23 Jun 2005 Posts: 32 Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Now that's looking great cigamit

Some export feature would be nice as well if possible

chadd · Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005 3:59 pm Post subject:

Great! I am glad that people are also interested in Inventory management. I actually haven't started, on the module I need to write - I have been busy with other things work related. I like the discovery module cigamit! I would like to expand it a bit though. What I was looking for, was an interface to add spares (cards,etc.. not available on the network - no IPs), a poller to run as a daemon to collect inventory on active devices and compare "current" with "stored" inventory - per device (maybe turn the device yellow - if what is in the field is out of sync with what is in the database) and give you the option to "sync", or replace what is currently in the field with what you have stored for that device in the database. It should also have an auto discover option, so when you add a device in cacti, it will also run the "discover" daemon to collect an inventory of the device. The daemon should check "discoveries" against inventory(spares, etc), to make sure the database stays acurate (takes spare out of "spares", and puts it into active inventory if it is discovered - example: you have a Cisco card in your inventory database marked as spare. You discover a new device that has the old "spare" card in it. Cacti then takes the card out of "spare" status and puts it in the new "device" it just discovered.. There should, of course, be prompts before it just does things, but you get the idea. I looked into this briefly, and it may require either getting vendor mibs to get all the things you want to track (i.e. line cards, processor cards, etc..), or just cheating and doing telnet/show commands in the equipment to get the inventory.. The SNMP way is, of course, prefered, but it is a vast endevor.. I know that most network equipment vendors have an NMS that does all this stuff, and there are plateforms like Nagios that do it too, but I need a cheep way - and I like having everything in one place (Cacti

. Anyway, hope I didn't bore anyone too much. I plan on starting this soon, but will most likely take a long time to develope it - as I am not really a coder, just a lowly network engineer.. I really can't wait to see what Cigamit comes up with. I am using his plugin arch/ thold and it is working great! I really want to see what 0.9 is going to look like. Plugin arch is supposed to be a new feature!! - just hope it doesn't break thold

..

Oh, also would like to add a few lines of code to the "add device" portion of Cacti, that would let you specify a "hostname" and "ipaddress". Then add a check box that would say, "update dns". That way, if you had a DNS server running on the Cacti server (hidden master for a subdomain, let's say

, you wouldn't have to waste time updating DNS for your network devices..

-chadd.

Lothegard · Joined: 20 Sep 2005 Posts: 20

How is it going with the Inventory plugin? looks nice.

/Lothegard

adrianmarsh · Cacti User Joined: 17 Aug 2005 Posts: 427 Location: UK

You might also want to check in with the folks at http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/ . OCSv3 used to let you put in all types of devices and card details. OCS NG seems more retricted, but I expect this will grow out.

I'm not sure I'd agree that Cacti was the right place to head for an inventory system, but a link-up between the two would be a good direction.