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But Why?

Why would you want to go to the trouble (“trouble”, hah, see the blog post video about downloading, installing and discovering in under 10 minutes here) of keeping track of every device and it’s configuration? Well, here are some contrived examples…

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What about if someone bought their laptop into the office and plugged in – would you know? That laptop could be a security nightmare and now it’s sitting on your network. Open-AudIT will see this new device and the “New Devices found int he last 7 days” report will show you. The Dashboard in Professional and Enterprise will also populate its graph. You will know. Your network will be safer.

Anfd And then there’s software licensing – that’s a given. Naturally Open-AudIT can report on exactly what software packages are installed. It’s simple and easy to see if you have bought the required number of licenses.

Features?

As a result of Open-AudIT storing the data about a device, it also recognizes and stores and changes affected upon a device. If software was added or removed (for example) Open-AudIT stores this and can report upon it. This is taken even further by the concept of a Baseline, which exists in Open-AudIT Enterprise. Baselines enable you to compare one device against another and report the differences.

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The feature list is extensive and enables tracking of all IT assets, whether they be on your network or not. Need to record the details of a phone given to a user – not an issue. Open-AudIT can do that. What about the PC that’s not physically connected to the network – Open-AudIT still has the ability to audit the machine and store the details. From their location, to how they’re configured, to who is is in the Administrators group, to when a piece of software was installed, to ensuring file changes (/etc/htpasswd ?) are recorded. Open-AudIT can tell you exactly WHAT is on your network, HOW it is configured and WHEN it changes. Easily. Automatically. Simple.

How does it work?

Open-AudIT works best when you supply a list of credentials that it then uses to query devices. Open-AudIT makes use of Nmap to scan a network and report any responding devices. These devices are then queried to determine their attributes. Even if you don’t have the credentials for a device on your network, Open-AudIT will still have a record of it thanks to Nmap. If a device is found, working credentials determined and it is a ‘computer’, an “audit script” is copied to the device and run. The script gathers extensive information and sends it back to the Open-AudIT server. If the device is a switch, router, printer, etc and it has SNMP enabled and Open-AudIT has working credentials, it’s attributes will be queried using SNMP and no audit scripts will be used.

Once the data is in Open-AudIT, it is yours to query at will. The database structure is open and documented with examples to get you started (if one of the built-in 50 reports don’t do just what you need).

How is it built?

Open-Audit Community is built using free and cross-platform tools such as PHP, MySQL, and Apache. In addition, Open-AudIT uses VBscript and Bash for its audit scripts. Both Professional and Enterprise use the same codebase Community API with available further features enabled by the license. Both Professional and Enterprise are commercial compiled binary code with support offered to users by Opmantek. Accessing Community is via /open-audit/index.php and Professional / Enterprise via /omk/open-audit on your webserver.

Licensing

Open-AudIT started as a free software project. To this day it remains so. In recent years Opmantek Software has become the owners of the codebase code-base and monetize this by creating add-ons in the form of Open-AudIT Professional, Open-AudIT Enterprise, Open-AudIT Collector and Open-AudIT EnterpriseCloud.

The original Open-AudIT is referred to as Open-AudIT Community. Open-AudIT Community is the “engine” of Professional and Enterprise. It is Afferro GPL licensed and will always remain free software.

Open-AudIT Professional, Enterprise, Collector and Enterprise Cloud are commercial closed source programs, licensed by Opmantek to customers and users. Opmantek supply a free 20 device license to users. Professional, Enterprise, Collector and Enterprise Cloud build upon the foundation of Community and offer extra features and benefits. These can be seen in the table below.

Installing

Opmantek supply Open-AudIT as a packaged binary. Windows users will also need to (separately) install Nmap. Windows installs include a full WAMP stack, where-as the Linux package uses the native package manager to install these dependencies.

Using

If you have no interest in Professional, Enterprise, Collector or Cloud and the benefits they offer over and above Community, you can simply click the "Do not show me again" button when running Community and you will never be prompted about these options again. Opmantek uses the commercial programs to support development of the open source application.

Publicly Available Code

The source code for Open-AudIT is available on Github and is AGPL licensed. This code does not include the installer so users will need to take care of installing the dependencies and configuring the required services themselves. This source code does not include any Open-AudIT Professional, Enterprise, Collector or Cloud code as these are commercial closed source applications.

You can find the code at https://github.com/Opmantek/open-audit