OCS Inventory

OCS Inventory
Stable release 2.1.2 / July 13, 2014
Written in Perl, PHP
Platform multi-platform (Unices, Windows, others)
Type hardware inventory
License GNU General Public License[1]
Website ocsinventory-ng.org

Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation (OCS inventory NG) is free software that enables users to inventory IT assets. OCS-NG collects information about the hardware and software of networked machines running the OCS client program ("OCS Inventory Agent"). OCS can visualize the inventory through a web interface. Furthermore, OCS includes the capability of deploying applications on computers according to search criteria. Agent-side IpDiscover makes it possible to discover the entirety of networked computers and devices.

History

The open-source OCS Inventory NG project started in late 2005 and produced its first "final release" early in 2007.[2]

Internal operation

The dialogue between OCS client machines and the server depends on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The software formats data in XML.

Server

The management server uses Apache, MySQL and Perl. OCS runs on multiple platforms: under Unixes and under Microsoft Windows (95 or later).

A simple design and the use of mod_perl deliver good server-side performance: a modest host can inventory several thousands of machines.

Agents

In order to collect detailed information, one can install agents on the client machines in the inventory. Client agents are available for:

Web interface

An optional web interface written in PHP offers complementary services:

Extension

OCS Inventory can be used to feed the manager of GLPI and thus offers part of an IT asset management solution.

Modularity

Since version 1.0rc3, most of OCS Inventory functionality can be adapted or extended via a module system.

License

OCS Inventory consists of free software published under GNU GPL v2. The developers own the copyright.

References

  1. http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/index.php?page=license
  2. Antal, Barzan (2010). IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02. Packt Publishing Ltd. ISBN 9781849511117. Retrieved 2015-02-16. OCS Inventory NG [...] is the name of an open source project that was started back in late 2005. The project matured into the first final release in the beginning of the year 2007.

External links