Introduction to Open-AudIT
Open-AudIT is a program designed to track, store and report on query your IT and related assets details and configuration. Open-AudIT can tell what is on your network, how it is configured and if there have been any changes.
Data Types
Data exists in two basic forms - manually input data and automatically discovered data. Manual data might be attributes such as purchase date, vendor, location, etc. Automatically discovered data may be attributes such as computer name, computer serial, switch ip address, etc.
Data Gathering
Data is inserted into Open-AudIT in one of several ways. Data can be manually inserted and updated directly in the web interface by the user or be uploaded via Excel spreadsheet. Automatically discovered data is where the application queries network devices and determines attributes without any user involvement. The application performs these queries according to the type of device being discovered. Windows and Linux computers have the ability to have many attributes reported on queried via scripts. Items such as switches and routers can be queried via the SNMP protocol. Other networked devices can be scanned using the Nmap program.
Storing Data
For a detailed account of how Open-AudIT determines what is a current attribute and what is an attribute that has changed or does not exist, see "Information about how Open-AudIT processes and stores data".
Accessing the Data
As of v2.0, Open-AudIT no longer uses groups as the primary method of access. Users of Open-AudIT now have one or more Roles which in turn have permissions on collections within Open-AudIT. Examples of collections are devices, discoveries, locations, etc. Permissions are simple - create, read, update and delete or CRUD. In combination with a user's roles, a user also has access to one or more Organisations (Orgs). Every item in a collection is assigned to an organization. We combine what (roles) they are allowed to do with which items (orgs) they are allowed to do it on.
Groups are now simply a list of devices. User A can view the same group as User B, but if they have a different list of orgs they are allowed to operate on, they will likely see a different list of devices.
The old way of working (pre v2.0) is below.
Open-AudIT classifies devices into Groups. A device may belong to more than one Group. A Group can be based on any attribute a device has. Groups are readily created in XML format or via the web page. Open-AudIT comes with over 40 Groups pre-defined. Groups can be activated or not (turned on or off). Some Groups are automatically created (base don based on network subnet, for example).
...
The combination of devices, groups and users is very powerful and access can be very specific if required.
Using the Data
Once Open-AudIT has the asset data, reporting querying this data can be readily achieved. Open-AudIT comes with nearly 50 Report definitions already created. Reports can be activated or not (enabled for user access or not). Report definitions are stored in an easy to read XML report definition format. A tutorial on creating a Report can be found in "How to create a Report definition". Reports can be at a point in time or more advanced reporting can show trends or even forecasts. Report Queries and Summaries already created. All data can be requested in the classic web interface format or XML, JSON, Excel, CSV , HTML or HTML table formats. Some Reports can even be requested via RSS for easy consumption in Outlook (or your feedreader of choice)formats using the (new for v2.0) restful API.
Open-AudIT Professional and Enterprise adds add the ability to request reports Reports be run on a pre-defined schedule and emailed or stored.