Inventory / Site survey tool
Philop Schorr suggested i drop a comment here for a feature that Jeff Behl and i were working on. You can look at ticket #2722 or get my number from Jeff and call me if you want a run down on the details.
Basically i am looking for a site survey or inventory tool. It would be great to drop a collector on a customers computer, run a scan on their local subnet or a range of IP addresses with one or multiple SNMP strings, have all the devices loaded into a group and then report specific output to an excel report. Things i would be interested in seeing on the report:
ITEM ID SERIAL NUMBER SOFTWARE VERSION SNMP STRING IP ADDRESS\'s HOSTNAME UPTIME
CISCO2801 FTXxxxxxxx 12.4(28)T8 IPBASEK9 Test 192.168.1.2 2801CMElab 1 day, 13 hours, 15 minutes
It would be great to get a report of all servers and networking equipment at their site so you could generate a quote to monitor everything. As an added bonus all their equipment is already loaded into monitoring! You could offer health check services, inventory analysis for purchasing their equipment or offering upgrades to outdated gear, offer warranty services, check software versions for vulnerabilities, etc etc etc. (I could keep going here but you get the idea).
Before you say Netformx or whatsconnected let me tell you i have used both and they have issues. Jeff already figured out how to load two new fields into our portal and it shows all Cisco devices serial numbers and part id\'s. \'\'Cisco Serial Numbers by number \'\' This MIB or OID or whatever he used has already proven better at detecting the correct PID and serial of not only the chassis but the sub modules (power supplies, HWIC\'s, NM cards, SUP720 blades, etc) then both Whatsconnected and Netformx. So he already figured out the first part and all i really need is a reporting function to export those fields listed above to an excel report and you have Netformx and whatsconnected beat. At least on the accuracy of part ids and serials that is. Sure they might have more fields they can report on but once you get the framework down im sure you could include any SNMP grabable field into the report/scan.
Also worth noting is that the first thing most ticketing systems or hardware providers will want is the serial number of the problematic device. For us our ticketing system now links to LogicMonitor alerts and a ticket is created. We are working to have the chassis serial number populate on the ticket as that serial number 99% of the time is what brings up the warranty status and service levels for that customer. I could imagine this is similar for most networking equipment and server tech support companies. It just makes sense to have those serial numbers in LogicMonitor and in the alert emails if needed.
Long post, sorry. Check out my portal, talk to Jeff, give me a call. I would love to work on it more with you guys.
Cheers,
