Client Management Suite

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  • 1.  Asset Management Process

    Posted Mar 24, 2011 05:49 AM

    Can anyone tell me what type of process they have you in place for managing and controlling your assets? For example how and who updates the CMDB (in Altiris or whatever Service Management Tool is in place)? If for example you purchased 30 new pc's, what's the process for updating those onto the system?

    The reason I ask is we're in the process of moving away from manual Asset registers to Altiris Client Management Suite (Inventory Solution), which will feed a new Service Management Tool which is all pretty new. Before this our engineers just manually updated the Asset Register which was very prone to error, with no real ownership or process in place for updating... Our estate contains over 20,000 devices which is why i'm curious to know what type of control measures I could put in place...

    Any feedback, white paper docs of links you can advise me on would be much appreciated.

    Regards,

     

    GOC



  • 2.  RE: Asset Management Process

    Posted Mar 24, 2011 08:13 AM

    My feelings is that it is down to image control. If you can guarantee you are getting the Altiris client with any new PC then the rest falls into place. This can be done at factory with a custom image (well it can with Dell, i expect other manufacturers have a similar setup). For migrating to using CMS then its managing to get the client on every machine and this depends how homogenous your environment is. For smaller environments with less techies and people that are inclined to follow set procedures you will have more success in maintaining an accurate database by deploying standard images. Large places, with multi sites and many techies who like doing things their own way will struggle more.

    At EoL you have the same issue - a small site could manage decomissioning with a procedure, we had a VB script on our build that disjoined from AD and Altiris. Once again, its really what you want and what you can achieve depending on your size and the ease with which you can adopt new procedures.

    So we dont have or need a process for getting PC's into Altiris since the client is on the build image and will report in once connected. Once it disappears you have a number of options depending on how much control you have or want over your environment. I've made up plenty of reports which show how long PC's have been missing for but I imagine on the size of estate you have it's unlikely you will pursue things that disappear for a month at least and most of the ones that do turn out to be broken clients or some configuration issue.

    I would refer to management and stick down your main goals for having Altiris and never lose sight of those goals. They will direct how you use the tool, for there are many ways :)



  • 3.  RE: Asset Management Process

    Posted Mar 29, 2011 06:21 AM

    Thanks for your thoughts Michael - much appreciated. Yea my estate has over 20,000 devices which consists of several sites. I was thinking along the lines of letting Altiris detect the new devices and me also receiving the appropiate paperwork etc form the technicians on the ground so as I can then Audit / compare what Altiris gives me with what the paperwork (sales invoices etc) give me?



  • 4.  RE: Asset Management Process

    Posted Mar 29, 2011 08:45 AM

    It dawned on me that you are interested in AM right from the point of purchase and i feel the need to mention that CMS level 1 might not give you everything you need. There is an Asset management component which allows the input of data and contracts and licenses etc before they are discovered. I'm afraid i dont have experience with it but if you have a specific query about AM prior to the PC hitting the network I can imagine sales trying to talk you into purchasing that.

    Outside of Asset Management as a product and talking about the old CMS level 1, whilst you have your machine plugged into the network you have it sorted. The AD import from NS7 is much improved and has customiseable filters for computer accounts being over a certain age without reporting. this allows a certain amount of leeway with an Active Directory that is perhaps full of old computers that dont exist. However you do want to utilise AD because it will tell you all your problem PC's too.

    Without AM as a product, using NS to tie up sales invoices will be tricky and almost definitely require process. You also have the unknown element of storeage time. Feasibly you could definitively say that a PC hasnt hit the network and use the list of ones that have against the sales invoice to manually produce things that need chasing up. i would suggest using MAC or BIOS asset tags for that and the report from Altiris is simple to spit out that list if thats the best thing to compare agaisnt your sales paperwork.

    Depending on how much money you have available to spend on a product to do this i think everyone's dream is to have a barcode scanner for organising the movement of computers into and out of storeage. I think Dell's even have an asset of their BIOS code in a barcode sense. Items delivered woudl be barcodeed to a storeroom and uploaded to the altiris asset management database initially.

    But we can dream.



  • 5.  RE: Asset Management Process

    Posted Sep 20, 2011 10:31 PM

    go read my paper on asset management using altiris



  • 6.  RE: Asset Management Process



  • 7.  RE: Asset Management Process

    Posted Sep 28, 2011 01:03 AM

    I had my vendor barcode assets and put the asset in the bios before shipment  to me. The asset tag was in the shipping log that was sent nightly to me and by FTP and uploaded into the contract database. cost was like $15 additional per pc

    the warehouse guys would download the days shipment into their barcode scanners.

    All the details of how I achieved 99.95 % lease turn in after 3 years are in my two papers

    In the end Altiris is just a tool that needs good process management wrapped around it