Introduction to Open-AudIT

Open-AudIT is a program designed to track and report on your IT Assets details and configuration.

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 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 "How does Open-AudIT process and store data?". Open-AudIT stores the data assets in Groups. Application users have a level of access on a per Group bases. For detailed information see "Users and Groups".

Using the Data

Once Open-AudIT has the asset data, reporting can be readily achieved. Report definitions are stored in an easy to read XML report definition format. A tutorial on creating a Report can be found in "Defining Reports". Reports can be at a point in time or more advanced reporting can show trends or even forecasts.