This was the phrase that started it all, this forced Open-AudIT founder Mark to develop the Open-AudIT software. Fast-forward almost 20 years and similar questions are still being asked in many organisations worldwide. What has changed though is the process of acquiring this information, 20 years ago Mark drove to each location and manually counted each install. Today to get this same information, a report can be run and it will take a few seconds. The more proactive user will have this report scheduled and waiting in an inbox whenever desired.

The goal extends further than a counting exercise, there is now a lot more at stake. Formerly, software licensing was the number of installs, but this process has expanded and become more complicated. Gartner has presented guidelines to leverage the current software licensing that is in place using Software Asset Management.

The first steps, however, are fundamental to what Open-AudIT does as an open source program. Device Discovery and Inventory Management are two core principles behind Open-AudIT and they also coincide with the first two steps in minimising your software licensing spend.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has led to many businesses capitalising on the computational potential and the increase in data available in everyday objects. The breadth of devices with internet connectivity has been increasing exponentially, CEB (CEBglobal – IoT Security Primer) suggests that the number of connections will grow from 6 million in 2015 to 27 billion by 2025. This increase has led to many new products and many new vendors operating in a market that can be vulnerable to catastrophic attacks. They continue by saying almost 40% of businesses believe that Poor Visibility and Understanding is their leading risk management challenge.

The underlying problem with a network that is considered to have poor visibility is the limited ability to discover everything that is connected to it. NMIS can manage any device that has an IP address, so if it is connected to your network, directly or indirectly, NMIS will know.

With the evolution of devices, there should be equal to greater sophistication in the understanding practices that are used to monitor devices. NMIS collects information from any device on your network and by using the ‘sysObjectId’ variable, it can attribute a vendor to the device from the Enterprise list. The list of vendors is continually expanding, you can peruse the most common list here. However, the true functionality of NMIS is the ability to control new vendors. This process is better explained – Here!

The increased visibility combined with custom thresholding using NMIS, there will be greater control over your network. Users of NMIS will be familiar with SNMP and device modelling, but there are more custom controls that are available. Watch Keith Sinclair (Opmantek CTO) present a webinar that walkthroughs the use of MIBs for custom function, device modelling and custom thresholding. This webinar is located – Here!

Here at Opmantek, we are constantly looking for new ways to help your workday. If you have any feature requests, webinar topics or ideas you would like to see get developed, don’t hesitate to reach out.

A long, long time ago, in a town far, far away, I used to work for a financial institution. A small financial institution. Quite small. As in no IT management software small. As in if we wanted to update our desktops, we had to write a batch script and copy it “by hand” to individual devices and run it one at a time.

Once upon a time, my manager approached me and asked: “How many installs of MS Office do we have?”. I could not reliably answer the question, so I set about finding out how I would find out. At the time Microsoft had a product called SMS Server. Its purpose was to manage your Microsoft Windows PCs. It was also expensive. Well, it was expensive for a small financial institution. Expensive enough that my manager denied the funding and put me in a car to drive from north to south and record by hand the MS Office installs on 100 PCs across 12 branches and 200 kilometres. Good times!

I’ve always been the kind of guy who likes to write code. I think I first wrote some basic back in about 1982. Damn, I’m showing my age now! Obviously, I was thinking – well, if Microsoft can retrieve the information, then how? How are they doing that? That lead me to VBScript and WMI. For our Windows NT machines, these were optional components, but for our new Windows 98 machines, it was built in, yay! Yes – Windows NT and 98. Things are a little different now, but back then a lot of businesses looked at IT as a simple expense that they didn’t want. Hence as little money as possible was spent on it. Windows NT and 98 it was. And no management software for you.

OK, so I found VBScript and WMI. So what? I somehow need to write a script to retrieve details from PCs and actually store it somewhere. The obvious answer is in a database. We were a Microsoft shop, so SQL server. Uh oh – that costs money. No way. Funding denied. Sigh. Well, guess what? Further research turned up this software called “Open Source”. I could have a web server, a database and even an entire operating system FOR FREE. What? What is this voodoo? Oh, and the kicker – it would run on an old desktop PC we had retired. Call me sold.

I was so enamoured with the idea of open source that when requesting the project approval I stated that the code should be licensed under an Open Source license. I would write it by night at home and use it at work. The copyright would stay with me, but the business would benefit from having a tool to be able to list what software was on our machines. It would cost the business $0. Project approved!

And so was born WINventory. Windows Inventory. It was designed first and foremost to retrieve details from Windows machines. Along the way came a name change to Open-AudIT, a healthy community, the ability to audit network devices (routers, switches, printers, etc) as well as computers running various operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS, AIX, Solaris, etc). Open-AudIT has grown and grown.

We added the ability to run reports on the data. Even to make your own reports. To “discover” a network as opposed to running the audit scripts on individual PCs and so much more.

Today, almost 20 years later, I couldn’t be more proud of how far this little spare time project has come and what we’ve achieved. Nowadays I work for Opmantek and develop Open-AudIT for a full-time job. Since arriving at Opmantek, Open-AudIT has gone from strength to strength and shows no signs of slowing down. Indeed we have so many ideas that I don’t know how I’m ever going to realise them all!

So many ideas, so little time.

So that’s how Open-AudIT came to be. We’re not slowing down so get in, sit down, shush up and hang on!

Onwards and upwards.

Mark Unwin.

The act of automation can greatly improve the efficiency of any network team. With regards to managing network infrastructure, Gartner suggests that any manual task performed more than 4 times a year should be automated. These mandates are usually answered by the more proactive teams and remain a fancy for most teams struggling with limited resources. However, the initial cost, in time or budget, is minor compared to the ability to leverage the opportunity costs of reducing human error, improving compliance and increasing work availability of staff.

Process automation is becoming a requirement because humans may no longer be able to manually keep up with real-time configuration changes. The prioritization of automation technologies enables a business to become more agile and responsive to shifting market/customer requirements.

The fast-approaching addition of the GDPR compliance standard to existing standards, PCI or HIPAA for example, will require businesses to be less passive with risk management. Risk should be managed and not avoided, GDPR acts as an invitation to change traditional business protocols because there is no avoiding the GDPR. To mitigate the risk of the GDPR improved compliance and accurate reporting is required, both rewards to successful network automation.

A common misconception regarding automation is that the outcome reduces the size of a team. This can occur in a reactive business, but a proactive business will transfer the workload from one project to another. The ability to cross train or upskill staff will make your team more valuable. There is the added benefit of becoming more agile in your approach to transitioning workflow from administrative tasks towards managing infrastructure or increasing client satisfaction.

Configuration and Compliance Management is now easier to implement with opConfig. opConfig will continuously monitor the configuration of devices discovered by Open-AudIT Enterprise or managed by NMIS, track the changes and store a complete history of configuration information. opConfig can leverage NMIS’ business policy engine, opEvents, to provide instantaneous correlation and notification when device configurations change or stray from enterprise policies. The combination of these systems will aid in your network automation, assist in the quick resolution of problems and compliance with standards.

In ITIC’s 2016 survey 98% of respondents indicated a single hour of network downtime costs them over $100,000, while 81% of Enterprises reported hourly outage costs exceeding $300,000, and 33% reporting losses in excess of $1-5 million/hour. When we talk network downtown we’re really referring to application and business service availability – is the software the business relies on operating within acceptable norms of responsiveness and accuracy?

Gone are the days when engineers could simply wait for an end-user to phone in a performance problem. Networks are far too complex, with multiple layers of redundancy and fail over, for the focus to be on the individual parts – a manager once told me, “it’s not the equipment that make the money, it’s what the equipment enables us do that gets everyone paid.” With potential losses of 5MM/hr it is crucial network teams have the tools in place to handle performance and fault monitoring, automate event handling, and roll-up individual device state and service status into more complex application and business service profiles.

You can visualize application and business service monitoring as a multi-layer problem; a pyramid of pieces. At the very bottom, the wide base of the pyramid, are all the individual parts, or widgets, that represent the components of the service. These are the servers, storage devices, switches, and load balancers that the application relies on for hosting and operation. But that base layer is also comprised of the specific key interfaces data flows through as well as the services each server hosts that the application needs – like the mysql or apache daemon. Above that layer are the components that comprise the entry user experience (UX); does the application’s login page load in a reasonable time? Finally, at the top-end of the pyramid is an end-to-end exercise of the application itself. Usually referred to as a synthetic transaction, this is about ensuring the entire application works from presentation, to business logic, and back-end layer.

The chart below displays the results of just such a test. The black line represents the state of the synthetic transaction, while the yellow line shows how long it takes to execute the synthetic transaction and get a result back. You can see where the black line dips that the synthetic transaction failed during that period, but since the yellow line was still drawing something came back, just not the expected result.

Each of these parameters can be thresholded, with escalation rules, and alarms assigned quickly and reliably using Opmantek’s Network Monitoring Information System (NMIS) Solution for performance and fault monitoring. Expanding NMIS with opCharts allows the creation of detailed application centric dashboards containing easily interpreted charts, like the one above.

Demands placed on the Network Operations Center increases exponentially as the Lines of Businesses they server become more dependent on applications and their frameworks to generate revenue. Tools like Opmantek’s NMIS, opCharts, and others can help engineers quickly and efficiently go from a high, abstracted view of the application down to a root cause, automating collection of troubleshooting information and even self-heal the network.

For more information on Opmantek’s Discovery and Asset Auditing, Performance and Fault Monitoring, Configuration and Compliance Solutions, or to schedule a demonstration, please visit our website at www.opmantek.com or email us at contact@opmantek.com.

Paul McClendon | Software Support 
Desk: 1(704)909-2829 
paulm@opmantek.com

“Open-AudIT is exactly what we needed to be able to address the GDPR requirements of a large European government. We had it up and collecting in 90 minutes.” – PeterS (Sales Engineering head of EMEA Global Systems Integrator).   The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation that intends to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. If your company is EU based or does business in the EU, you will have to comply with the GDPR. The GDPR comes into effect on the 25th May, 2018.   Open-AudIT can provide very valuable insights into your IT infrastructure and assist in your GDPR compliance.   As part of the GDPR you must be able to show that you know where your customer data is stored and be monitoring for potential breaches. To be able to determine where your data is, first you need to know What’s On Your Network. Obviously, this is where Open-AudIT steps up.   From download to install to discovering devices and reporting on their hardware, software and settings in under 10 minutes. Don’t believe me? Too good to be true? Check out this recent blog post of mine that proves it. Under 10 minutes from nothing to having a discovered network of devices.   Not only can Open-AudIT discover your devices, but it also tracks any changes to them. Software installed or removed, users & group membership changes, file changes, hardware changes – and so much more. So there’s your devices found and any changes to them being recorded.   But Open-AudIT can do more, much more. What about listing all your databases (SQL Server and MySQL) and websites (IIS and Apache)? What about comparing a group of devices to see where they are different in terms of installed software? What about emailing the many included reports and summaries directly to you in a format of your choosing? What about the Restful JSON API. It’s completely open. It’s your data. We just help you to unlock it.   And on top of that – what about automating it all?   Open-AudIT really does make it simple to report on What’s On Your Network and help with your GDPR compliance.   Download it today from https://opmantek.com/network-discovery-inventory-software/, there’s a free 20 device license waiting for you.   I genuinely hope you find Open-AudIT as useful as I do.   Oh, and by the way – I still didn’t mention Active Directory and OpenLDAP integration. And the maps. And the networks listing. And assigning assets to different departments or companies. And the custom fields. And the many inbuilt queries and summaries. And the ability to make your own queries and summaries. And the other features too numerous to list. It’s all documented on the Open-AudIT wiki. Check it out for either a quick overview or a deep dive into the specifics. And if you have questions – there’s always the Forums and Questions sites as well!   What are you waiting for? Try Open-AudIT today!