16. 12. 2024
Asset Management
One of my customers, who uses GLPI very extensively for asset management, recently brought me a new request wanting a central overview of their host and IP registration. These host names and IPs are currently being maintained across various applications and tools, although GLPI is used as the central administrative application.
As is so often the case, this situation has grown organically over time. There are also various departments that are allowed to put devices into operation in their own defined network area. So often what happens is that host names or IP addresses were incorrectly assigned twice. In addition, it has become difficult for employees in IT operations to keep track of all devices and maintain a complete inventory.
After some deliberation, we decided to expand their existing GLPI installation with a plug-in that can meet this requirement, which we named IPTool. In a more detailed joint analysis, we defined the following three main implementation steps:
- The new IPTool plug-in should automatically pick up information on hostnames and IP addresses from various applications (such as DHCP, DNS, vsphere, ActiveDirectory, monitoring, print server tools, PHPIpam, etc.) via standard interfaces. When searching for a host name, you should be able to easily find out which tool already maintains that host name.
- The second step should start after the first step has been successfully implemented. This step provides for an alarm to be sent as soon as the IPTool plug-in detects new host names or IP addresses in other applications.
- The last step essentially automates the second step, which means that if an alarm occurs, the host should then be automatically created within GLPI. Thus the whole cycle would be completely mapped.
Since several thousand devices may be loaded when these requirements are put into practice, every interface must of course be carefully tested. We are currently in the implementation phase of the first step and the data from five different applications are now already displayed in IPTool.
This use case shows once again how sometimes complex requirements can be processed via GLPI.
Due to the relatively simple creation of additional plug-ins, the functional scope of GLPI can be expanded in an interesting way.
The development of this IP tool is being carried out by my colleague Mirko Morandini.
Tobias Goller
NetEye Solution Architect at Würth Phoenix
I started my professional career as a system administrator.
Over the years, my area of responsibility changed from administrative work to the architectural planning of systems.
During my activities at Würth Phoenix, the focus of my area of responsibility changed to the installation and consulting of the IT system management solution WÜRTHPHOENIX NetEye.
In the meantime, I take care of the implementation and planning of customer projects in the area of our unified monitoring solution.
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