14. 11. 2024
Bug Fixes
01. 07. 2024
Mirko Morandini
Asset Management, Unified Monitoring
It’s Time to Move from OCS to GLPI Agents + Exclusive GLPI News for You!
It’s been two years now since TecLib released GLPI 10, a completely redesigned version of the popular Asset Management system. It natively integrates an asset inventory server and is delivered together with inventory agents called “GLPI Agents”. These agents are available for the major operating systems, from Windows to Linux and Android. The GLPI inventory server and its agents are a fork of the powerful tool Fusion Inventory, with which they remain compatible, and inherit most of its functionalities.
In NetEye we’ve historically included a concurrent tool, the OCS Inventory server and agents, together with the GLPI ocsinventoryng plugin, which syncs the inventoried data from the OCS server to GLPI. This synchronization has always been a weak point: computers need to be matched between the two servers and duplicates need to be avoided.
The inventory provided by GLPI agents covers everything provided by OCS, but more and more features have been integrated in the last years and months, such as the inventory of local virtual machines and databases. In addition, each GLPI agent can be the starting point for an SNMP network scan with leading-edge OID recognition for nearly all network devices and printer models. Remote scanning of computers and ESX hosts completes the tool.
In the last few years more and more community members of the OCS-GLPI interface plugin have migrated over to GLPI agents. Because of the fast evolution of GLPI, we’ve now arrived at a point where more and more small synchronization bugs are appearing, which are not being patched. In fact, for longer than a year now, NetEye lists OCS as being deprecated.
Now, we’d like to warmly suggest that you finally migrate all your computers to GLPI agents! The transition is smooth and can even be done step by step. You will lose some benefits of a divided database, but in return you’ll have access to a powerful and flexible rules engine for asset synchronization.
Moreover, if you install the “GLPI Inventory” plugin (https://github.com/glpi-project/glpi-inventory-plugin), you will be able to remotely control each agent’s ability to perform a network discovery, ESX inventory and SNMP inventory of the network neighborhood.
To remind you of this switch, starting from NetEye 4.37, the OCSInventory plugin will no longer be activated by default! If you still need it, you need to go to the plugins management and reactivate it.
So, get your agents (https://github.com/glpi-project/glpi-agent/releases), follow the NetEye Guide https://neteye.guide/4.36/service-management/asset-management/configuration.html and test GLPI inventory. For any help don’t hesitate to contact us!
Bonus part: GLPI 11 preview 😊
If you were brave enough to read till here, now you’ll get some exclusive news about the forthcoming release of GLPI 11!
While GLPI 10 brought a completely reworked graphical user interface and, of course, the introduction of the above mentioned native inventory, GLPI 11 will have huge, highly impactful changes under the hood:
- Teclib natively includes a completely reworked version of the “generic objects” and “fields” plugins, so that the asset classes can be easily extended.
- The popular datainjection plugin (for CSV file import) will be replaced by an integrated, generalized import feature.
- A new REST API and webhooks will enhance the creation of interfaces.
And last, the really exclusive news: It will finally be possible to give read and update permissions for single assets, based on group membership. This feature, financed by Würth IT, will greatly enhance the possibility of giving selective access to GLPI to the whole company.
Takeaways:
- The OCS-GLPI interface is deprecated.
- Switch to GLPI agents now!
- GLPI agents have several additional features such as SNMP and ESX scans
- GLPI 11 will be another great step ahead with fully adaptable and extendible asset classes
- GLPI 11 introduces group-based access permissions, commissioned by Würth IT
Let’s rock IT with GLPI!
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Mirko Morandini
Mirko Morandini, PhD, is part of the EriZone team since 2015. As a consultant, he guided the implementation of EriZone in various projects in the DACH area and in Italy.
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