Showing items from it systems administration

Tools for Sysadmin - Managing IT Assets the Right Way

Managing IT Assets: Where do I begin? In the previous write-up, I looked at IT asset management from a bird’s eye view. Below, we will dive into the tools and techniques for managing IT assets from a technical perspective. Which tool is the most important one to have? First and foremost, what you need to have is knowledge. This naturally includes the actual knowledge of your profession, but also knowledge of the resources and environments you have to work in. IT asset management, in a minimal technical sense, should answer these questions: What do you have? How can it be accessed? Where is it? What does it do? Access is a wider, more sensitive question; documenting access procedures with passwords and pin codes is not something that should be done as an asset management function, or even be considered. On the other hand, it’s good to keep in mind while finding out what you have: are there access methods or routes that shouldn’t be there?

Continue Reading

A Sysadmin's Perspective of IT Asset Management

My Motivation for IT Asset Management We’ve probably all heard the story about a group of blind men who try to describe an elephant. Each of them feels only one part of the elephant and so gets a very different idea of the animal to the others. As none of them are stomped to death, we can safely assume that the elephant is tame. This probably feels very distant from IT asset management, but it happens to be relevant. If you decide to skip managing your assets, you will eventually share the experience of the blind guy who couldn’t tell what elephants are like, but knows from personal experience what they leave behind. In reality, the exact number of devices in your environment is probably trivial to come up with. At least you can come up with a rough estimate and get more exact results after a while. If you think about it, addresses, locations and other characteristics seem essential in describing what you have.

Continue Reading