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The question had already been asked many times here, I know, and I've done my homework. I have however never found answer for my specific issues, so I am going to rephrase:

I am looking for a systems/assets/maintenance management software which would allow me to keep in check the following items: - systems assets: servers, workstations, databases along with - services assets: warranty dates, technical support contracts (validity, expiry date, contact info), maintenance dates (regular cleaning of tape units, PSU checking, ...)

I am not looking for network and server health monitoring, there's plenty of it and we have Nagios and Zabbix in place and expanding. None of these allow me to have a nice overlook of state of contracts, etc., warn me of expiration dates, ...

I am talking of few dozens of systems, few dozens contracts, ...

Anyone knows/uses such a package? Should I roll my own? Thank you for any insights and suggestions!

Additional info:

Thing is, I regularly get questions such as "gimme a list of all systems that have active support contracts", "gimme a list of all oracle database versions", "we have to do this on all systems with version X and maintenance contract", "what is the status of system X regarding contracts" and so on...

This calls for a database in my head, even knowing it is probably overshot. I cannot nicely extract such data from a wiki, or can I? We're already using Atlassian Confluence which is nice for keeping dossier of a system at a time, but I can't have an overview of one feature over all dossiers...

3 Answers 3

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With only a few dozen systems and contracts, I'd seriously look at just doing it in a wiki with a few HTML tables. I've seen some really neat asset tracking stuff done with semantic mediawiki, although I can't find it at the moment (I'll edit if I stumble across it).

Any pre-built thing is likely to either be buggy as buggery, or massively overblown. Writing something yourself will take orders of magnitude more time than a wiki, but might be a fun side project on the train or a rainy weekend.

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  • The second paragraph well illustrates my thinking at the moment!
    – slovon
    Nov 17, 2009 at 13:08
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What I used in the past was a custom Lotus Domino Database.

I created a views of documents, per server name, OS, Software running on it, Document attached for support, Note for repairs like Hard drives, reader of tape lib that was changed, date, copy of the chat with the tech.

I scanned all the documents and then used the Microsoft Office Imaging OCR (optical Characters recognition) to be able to search by key words.

Also linked all the CD iso of specific servers on a SAN where I had enough room (I needed about 200GB).

It was quite a long process took me about 6 months to handle 300 servers (doing this on top of my others duties), but after ... it was so easy to pull information, stats, history (and please the management :-) )...

I have seen a lot of custom grow application to manage contracts, I had Domino and felt comfortable to develop a small application, It was fairly easy (and I'm a system administrator not a dev). What I liked was the search function that was working really well, and the views to present different type of informations.

My guess is that it might be possible to do it also with Sharepoint, or with a Wiki.

The key for me was to pick tools that were already in place and available.

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  • We also have Lotus Domino, will check how easy it is to build something.
    – slovon
    Nov 19, 2009 at 15:37
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I agree with the above. We use a wiki for information. The the IT team have there own shared calendar which we put renewal dates and the like onto it and get the email notifications from that.

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