I would like opinions on network inventory software for a medium sized financial business.
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Could you add a little more detail to the question? What platforms do you need to inventory? Do you just want inventory, or do you want configuration management and provisioning as well? – Murali Suriar May 29 '09 at 23:17
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needs more detail but is probably OK as-is until a better version of this is asked – Jeff Atwood May 30 '09 at 05:35
6 Answers
If you are looking for network, server, pc, and software inventory check out spiceworks.
Great product. I have used it on both small and medium sized networks. And did I mention it is free

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This seems like it's been covered here:
Recommendations for automatic computer inventory
Lots of great answers there. Hope it satisfies your needs!

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I recently started using OCS Inventory and find it quite useful. The agent on the client regularly updates the central server, so its install and forget about it.

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If you are looking at purely network inventory (routers, switches, firewalls etc), then Opsware NAS and Voyence are two possible candidates. Both perform automated discovery, configuration management/backup and allow centralised configuration deployment.
I've not used it personally, but my understanding is that Voyence also has some nice features in terms of new device provisioning: i.e. you can define a set of best practise configuration, with some parameterised details like hostname, addressing etc and it will automatically provision a new device via a console connection.
If you are looking at more general inventory systems for everything (servers, desktops, network), then Spiceworks does appear to meet the needs of most users in small/medium sized businesses.

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If you're looking for network devices you could get what you wanted with OpenView.
If you're looking for server and desktop inventory there a ton of choices including Tivoli Provisioning Manager (IBM), UniCenter (CA), or System Center (Microsoft). Of course those are on the expensive end.
We use Admin Arsenal (our product). It has a strong focus on inventory collection, as well as other system management tasks.
www.AdminArsenal.com

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Hardware Inventory - is a free program for getting hardware and software information from all computers in your network. Home page: Hardware Inventory