opensource Asset Management software : Fusion Inventory

This is my second article on this topic, Asset management with opensource tools.
In the first article i’ve published information about OcsInventory NG, a mature French project that recently has released his 2.0 release.

Today we’ll take a look at Fusion Inventory, another French project that has exactly the same goals, but that’s much more recent.

FusionInventory’s goals

The goal of this project is to give to System administrators, and any person that has to manage asset inventory, a complete tool to discover, catalog, update their list of software and hardware Asset.

The software has many point in common with OCSInventory and one of the goals that the developers have it’s to stay compatible with OCSinventory server, so you could already have your OCSinventory server up and running, and now start to deploy fusioninventory agent that send the gathered information to it.

So in short the main goals are:

• to provide a complete solution for inventory, software distribution either as standalone, or integrated into third party applications (like GLPI)
• to provide a modular agent that can be extended by adding tasks (third party modules) to best suit your needs
• to work on various platforms and architectures
• to remain compatible with OCS Inventory NG

Fusioninventory is released with GPLv2 license, and is “born” at FOSDEM 2010, with the fusion of 2 projects: a fork of OCSInventory user agent for Unix and the Tracker Plugin for GLPI.

Fusion Inventory Components:

Agent: a software running on a computer, It can be installed on many systems:

• Windows 32 and 64 bits since version 2000
• Linux 32 and 64 bits
• *BSD
• AIX
• HP-UX
• Solaris
• Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC)
• Android

On unix Systems the agent is wrote in Perl.

Server: a software that can speak with the Agent, the server is wrote in PHP. Fusion inventory supports “push” and “pull”

• ”pull”: Agent =⇒ Server – the agent creates the connection to the server.
• ”push”: Agent ⇐= Server – the server awake the agent by itself.

Task: an action done by the Agent for the server, such as:

• Inventory
• Network discovery
• Remote SNMP inventory
• Software deployment
• vCenter/ESX/ESXi remote inventory
• Wake On Lan

Fusioninventory and GLPI

Like OCSInventory, Fusioninvenotry can be used as discovery agent for a GLPI server, and guess what, GLPI will be the next product in this list of Asset managment software.

FusionInventory can provide hardware, software inventory and network discovery to the IT asset management and helpdesk software called GLPI.
“FusionInventory for GLPI” is a collection of plugins using GLPI’s internal framework and philosophy (entities, habilitations, user interface, etc.) and communicate with some agents (FusionInventory-Agent), deployed on computers.

The plugins are:

• GLPI : fusioninventory (core) – This plugin is the core of different other plugins (fusinv….).It gives many functions and have the communication part with the agents.
• GLPI : fusinvinventory – The goal of this plugin is to get inventory (hardware, software) of computers and display it in GLPI.
• GLPI : fusinvsnmp – The goal of this plugin is to get remotly inventory of network equipment (switch, printers…) and to discovery all devices connected to the network.

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