What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to IT Inventory and Resource Management presents the importance of IT inventory within any organization or company. It describes some of the must-have features that an automated and centralized solution should provide. OCS Inventory NG comes into the picture saving the day and selecting many of those checkboxes.

Chapter 2, Setting up an OCS Inventory NG Management Server explains the server role requirements of an OCS-NG management server and leads the user through the steps of setting up the requisite software on the chosen platform. Once the system is ready, OCS-NG is installed and configured to collaborate with the agents that will soon be deployed.

Chapter 3, The Zen of Agent Deployment helps you understand the types of agents and the various ways agents can be deployed on client machines. This chapter presents operating system-specific strategies to automate the deployment of agents. Additional components that are required are thoroughly explained.

Chapter 4, Finding your Way through OCS-NG Features exposes the diversified features that OCS-NG sports and gives a rundown on each of them. From this chapter, you will learn how gathering from clients happens, how to sort the results, and accomplish all kinds of administrative tasks with the fresh inventory database.

Chapter 5, Investigating the Process of Gathering Inventory Data goes further beyond the actual mechanism of retrieving information and focuses on how to optimize and tweak this process as well as find leakages. Administrators can determine which devices are inventoried, how frequently they are inventoried, locate hosts that are not inventoried, and resolve synchronization issues.

Chapter 6, Package Deployment through OCS-NG takes a practical look at package deployment and command execution functionalities on inventoried clients. These increase the usefulness of our centralized inventory suite. This chapter opens to view the different ways in which you can do this as well as how to specify on which clients this can be done.

Chapter 7, Integrating OCS-NG with GLPI adds the icing on the cake by introducing integration possibilities with other tools. This chapter gives you the edge by explaining how GLPI empowers our OCS-NG inventory. Opting for GLPI on top of OCS-NG is akin to functionalities on steroids, and you will learn how to make it work.

Chapter 8, Best Practices on Inventorying with OCS-NG deals with all-around repetitive tasks related to IT inventories and management needs and how to get them solved with our setup. This chapter deals with some best practices and other tips of backing up the database. It also deals with everyday situations that can happen and need to be resolved seamlessly.

Chapter 9, Troubleshoot Confidently—Find Solutions and Workarounds continues the string of practical tips and tricks and good-to-know strategies. This chapter covers identifying issues, diagnosing common problems, troubleshooting them, and finding solutions for them.

Appendix, Keeping Pace with Version Updates—Glancing over the changelog of the Latest Release gives a brief overview on how to read changelogs, explains us what they are, and why they are useful to us. Their relevancy is quite high as every open source project has a changelog.