Are there advantages to using Snipe-IT and Spiceworks for Inventory/Assest Management?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
What's the purpose of inventory management? Why bother? It's one of the jobs I gave up when I was struggling with workload, and I haven't yet come across a situation where I regret my decision, so I'd be interested to know.
Well for knowing what assets are out there. If you want a list of all available printers or monitors, for example, and you can't just remember them all or where they are or what they are. If you need to communicate that data to other people, it is good too.
In a team of one with a single physical location and nothing fancy, they probably are not very useful unless the accounting department needs it. At least in the US, accounting always needs this because it is a huge amount of tax management based around the aging of assets.
For MSPs or larger firms, having an asset management system is the only reasonable way to know what even exists out there.
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I know what asset management software is for
I'm being specific about it's needs in a small business (85 employees)Our accounting department run their own asset management software. This makes sense as a single database of all the company's assets, not just IT assets. I don't feel any need to duplicate their work. But as I said, most of my IT expenditure is now treated as an expense, not an asset. This may be different in the US, I don't know.
I do have databases containing inventory details - specifically AD, LogMeIn, Meraki, Print Server. I just don't currently feel the need for an additional database, as I can normally use these tools to get any information I might need. But I'm interested to know how others are handling this.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Our accounting department run their own asset management software. This makes sense as a single database of all the company's assets, not just IT assets. I don't feel any need to duplicate their work. But as I said, most of my IT expenditure is now treated as an expense, not an asset. This may be different in the US, I don't know.
We can do that too, not sure how often we do do it, though.
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Well for us as an ITSP it is more complex because the asset management system is what communicates the asset information to new people. Like if I go to work on a client's systems that I have never worked on before, an asset management system is super valuable for getting a feel for what assets are even there. We use them extensively but it is not 85 users, it is more than 85 companies. And it is not a one person shop using the data, it is lots of people. So the needs are very different.
In an 85:1 shop (that should be an industry standard way to write that I think) I can easily see where it would not be useful and if the accounting department is keeping their own then that's completely different. This would be used, I assume, for the accounting people to access as well.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I know what asset management software is for
I'm being specific about it's needs in a small business (85 employees)Our accounting department run their own asset management software. This makes sense as a single database of all the company's assets, not just IT assets. I don't feel any need to duplicate their work. But as I said, most of my IT expenditure is now treated as an expense, not an asset.
I think you hit the nail on the head, for your situation. Your accounting department does this for you. Our accounting department does not do this for our company - i.e. no one does. Sure, she has the invoice, but what has amazed me is that she's never managed a list of actual assets. She simply gives the POs to the accounting firm who does our taxes, they lump it all together into a few line items, and old things never manage to actually get off the book - they just value out, but remain on the books with a zero value. My boss has asked that I help get this under some kind of real control - understandable state.
I'm going to be looking into Snipe-IT for this.
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Yes, I think that @Carnival-Boy underlines a point that asset tracking is often done by IT but at the end of the day is not exactly an IT task. It's really an accounting task that could easily be done by individual departments. In his case, accounting does it all. In many of our cases, IT does it or some of it.
We like to blend the asset tracking with asset management, which is different. A true asset system wouldn't care about an IP address assignment, for example, but we want to track that stuff. So our [NTG] needs are a little different from most.
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I think what you might want to think about is whether you want to do asset management or asset monitoring.
With asset monitoring, your scanner checks for HDD space, newly installed programs, updates, event log messages, anything you might want to watch out for, you can also get a report if device X has not been seen on the Lan for X number of days.
So although we often call it asset management, actually most IT guys would want to use asset monitoring more than management if they could.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
I think what you might want to think about is whether you want to do asset management or asset monitoring.
With asset monitoring, your scanner checks for HDD space, newly installed programs, updates, event log messages, anything you might want to watch out for, you can also get a report if device X has not been seen on the Lan for X number of days.
So although we often call it asset management, actually most IT guys would want to use asset monitoring more than management if they could.
Sure, but you can't monitor a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
I think what you might want to think about is whether you want to do asset management or asset monitoring.
With asset monitoring, your scanner checks for HDD space, newly installed programs, updates, event log messages, anything you might want to watch out for, you can also get a report if device X has not been seen on the Lan for X number of days.
So although we often call it asset management, actually most IT guys would want to use asset monitoring more than management if they could.
Sure, but you can't monitor a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Who needs to track those as assets? They are consumable items like printer paper and paper clips.
Edit: Well maybe not the monitor..
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@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
I think what you might want to think about is whether you want to do asset management or asset monitoring.
With asset monitoring, your scanner checks for HDD space, newly installed programs, updates, event log messages, anything you might want to watch out for, you can also get a report if device X has not been seen on the Lan for X number of days.
So although we often call it asset management, actually most IT guys would want to use asset monitoring more than management if they could.
Sure, but you can't monitor a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Who needs to track those as assets? They are consumable items like printer paper and paper clips.
Edit: Well maybe not the monitor..
We don't track any of that stuff either
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@Dashrender said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
I think what you might want to think about is whether you want to do asset management or asset monitoring.
With asset monitoring, your scanner checks for HDD space, newly installed programs, updates, event log messages, anything you might want to watch out for, you can also get a report if device X has not been seen on the Lan for X number of days.
So although we often call it asset management, actually most IT guys would want to use asset monitoring more than management if they could.
Sure, but you can't monitor a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
Why would you monitor those?
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The monitor was the main thing I was thinking.. the rest where there as examples of things you can't monitor, you can only inventory.
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@Dashrender said:
The monitor was the main thing I was thinking.. the rest where there as examples of things you can't monitor, you can only inventory.
I certainly do not inventory them. In fact the are in the office supply closet along with cheap USB speakers and the pens and paper.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
The monitor was the main thing I was thinking.. the rest where there as examples of things you can't monitor, you can only inventory.
I certainly do not inventory them. In fact the are in the office supply closet along with cheap USB speakers and the pens and paper.
Monitors are? lucky you - we're so tight there is a lock on the paperclip cabinet (OK not really, but you get my point).
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@Dashrender said:
@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
The monitor was the main thing I was thinking.. the rest where there as examples of things you can't monitor, you can only inventory.
I certainly do not inventory them. In fact the are in the office supply closet along with cheap USB speakers and the pens and paper.
Monitors are? lucky you - we're so tight there is a lock on the paperclip cabinet (OK not really, but you get my point).
Well honestly, no, the monitors are in the server room, but only because they don't fit in the office supply closet. There are 2 just sitting there for whenever they are needed.
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Thanks to everyone for the replies. I looked at the snipe-it website before posting and liked the idea of the check in and check out setup for items that are issued to people like laptops and smart devices. I was thinking that if it were something I should be doing, I would also track things like monitors and my shoretel phones.
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I figured that our accounting department must be doing something based on POs in terms of when things were purchased and which person/department was using them.
In terms of spiceworks, it does have sections for price paid, purchase date, warranty scanning for some devices, etc. So it has a little of asset management built into it.
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If those things probably aren't something I, as an IT guy, should worry about, I will just put a pin in it in case it comes up in the future.
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@wrx7m said:
In terms of spiceworks, it does have sections for price paid, purchase date, warranty scanning for some devices, etc. So it has a little of asset management built into it.
Yup, works great for currently used assets. For historic tracking, though, it requires database sprawl in the monitoring system which is generally not ideal.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@wrx7m said:
In terms of spiceworks, it does have sections for price paid, purchase date, warranty scanning for some devices, etc. So it has a little of asset management built into it.
Yup, works great for currently used assets. For historic tracking, though, it requires database sprawl in the monitoring system which is generally not ideal.
Yeah, that is definitely true. "Retiring" assets is cumbersome and not at all intuitive.
