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Atlassian, NetEye, Service Management
21. 12. 2017
Giuseppe Di Garbo
NetEye, Service Management
The Role of IT Asset Management in GDPR Compliance (Part II)
In my previous article I introduced what GDPR (General Data Protections Regulations) is, what measures it introduces, and how IT asset management (ITAM) can support it.
In this second post we’ll see which IT asset management modules are available in NetEye, our IT System Management solution.
Introduction
Within ITSM (IT Service Management), ITIL defines the process that controls the components of the services and infrastructure by aiming to maintain information on those Configuration Items (CIs) required to deliver an IT service and its relationships as “Service Asset & Configuration Management “.
The purpose of this process is to provide an accurate, logical model of services, assets, components and their relationships.
ITIL also helps us to define the Configuration Item (CI) – any component or service asset that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service. Examples of CIs can be organizations, processes, users, customers, suppliers, contracts, hardware, software, and business applications.
ITIL further defines the CMDB (Configuration Management Database), the repository that contains all relevant information about the components of a system used to deliver the services of an IT organization and the relationships between these components.
NetEye Modules
NetEye has integrated two of the most well-known and powerful open source projects for asset management (OCS Inventory NG and GLPI), as well as NeDi for network discovery.
Thanks to NeDi, you can easily and completely discover your network by automatically mapping network devices, making the most of the potential of the CDP, FDP and LLDP protocols.
The inventory of each network device is obtained thanks to the SNMP protocol, which permits managing a vast amount of information ranging from basic data (brand, model, serial number, firmware version, modules of each device, vlan, etc.) down to the status of every single network interface.
OCS Inventory NG is a very active project that allows extremely detailed collection of hardware and software inventory data. By introducing OCS inventory, you have the great advantage of using agents able to run on any type of operating system (from Microsoft Windows to many Linux distributions, Mac OSX, AIX and Solaris, and lately including even Android).
The inventory phase performed by the agents uses very low bandwidth with high performance.
OCS Inventory NG also includes a package deployment module and, thanks to the use of various plugins, it you can extend its functionality to data collection.
Within the asset management projects, we often define GLPI as the “ERP for the IT department”.
GLPI is a complete software solution released in 2003 and based on the ITIL v3 best practices, allowing you to manage all information related to the assets and their correlations in a centralized environment.
Multi-tenant support, advanced integration with Active Directory and LDAP, multilingual support, integration with OCS Inventory NG, advanced management of access profiles, the availability of numerous plugins to extend basic functionality and REST APIs are just some of the included enterprise features.
With GLPI you can manage the full range of IT resources, software licenses and the entire life cycle, covering all phases from purchase to sale.
Among the many types of assets that you can manage are smartphones, tablets, SIM cards, and customizable generic devices.
GLPI also includes an ITIL-based Service Desk system, contract and document management, a supplier registry, and an event notification system (providing, for example, an expiration notice for a contract or a license).
Conclusion
With the use of these software systems and their integration in NetEye, we can fully satisfy the discovery and inventory phases, as well as managing the complete IT Asset life cycle of any IT asset (and more things as well), including how they interrelate with one another.
These modules constitute a true Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that can be useful as a decision tool, as well as to track and manage all the configuration elements (assets, software installations, contracts, users, documents, etc.).
Giuseppe Di Garbo
Consultant at Würth Phoenix
Hi everybody. I’m Giuseppe and I was born in Milan in 1979. Since the early years of university, I was attracted by the Open Source world and operating system GNU\Linux. After graduation I had the opportunity to participate in a project of a startup for the realization of an Internet Service Provider. Before joining Würth Phoenix as SI consultant, I gained great experience as an IT consultant on projects related to business continuity and implementation of open source software compliant to ITIL processes of incident, change and service catalog management. My free time is completely dedicated to my wife and, as soon as possible, run away from Milan and his caotic time and trekking discover our beautiful mountain near Lecco for relax and lookup the (clean) sky.
Author
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