The tambourine exists. Proven Alloy Software

Recently, more and more publications devoted to the management of IT assets, how to organize them, licensing and accounting. This is no coincidence - IT infrastructure has become one of the most important assets of companies. Hardware and software play a key role in almost all business processes, which means that there is an acute problem of controlling and ensuring the smooth operation of all elements of the infrastructure. If small companies cope with the help of a staff of system administrators, then larger companies often face various troubles, since several engineers are unable to guarantee successful monitoring and fast service. Developers of integrated monitoring and IT infrastructure management systems have come to the aid of such companies.

Relations within the framework of IT infrastructure maintenance can be built in several main directions.

1. The company independently supports its IT infrastructure by system administrators.
   
   
2. The company itself provides services for the maintenance of someone else's IT infrastructure.
   ')
   
3. The company turns to outsourcers who serve its IT park.

In all three cases, tools are needed aimed at promptly informing about the problem and allowing to consider the received application in a comprehensive manner, assessing all the interactions and influence of the participants in the process.

Houston, we have problems

The IT infrastructure of any organization is made up of a variety of elements, including various hardware and software. The larger the company and the larger the staff, the greater the need for quick and quality control. Sooner or later, the system administrator is faced with typical problems caused by poorly managed IT infrastructure.

• The need to monitor computers and workstations located outside the local network: in branch offices, remote offices, working laptops of employees.
  
  
• The need to control peripheral equipment in the network: printers, scanners, cameras, multimedia projectors and other office equipment used in office needs. Used switches and routers, telephony nodes need strict control and instant debugging or redundancy.
  
  
• Software license management is an economic aspect. It often happens that the purchased amount of software licenses does not correspond to the number of licenses used, it turns out that expensive software is idle and you can get rid of such licenses in the next period. In addition, a license usage profile may indicate ways to save: for example, the use of non-registered, but competitive (for connection) software licenses for shift workers or employees who access the program from time to time.
  
  
• Software license management - user risk. Despite numerous instructions, signed regulations and verbal requests, users continue to independently install software on their work computers. Often, unlicensed software is installed intentionally or unknowingly, which, if checked, will cause trouble to the employer, not to the offending employee.
  
  
• Rapid diagnosis and elimination of problems associated with the use of IT infrastructure. The failure of any element can have a significant impact on the work of both an individual employee and entire departments, and even the entire company. Therefore, prompt identification of the problem is the key to effective uninterrupted operation.
  
  
• The need to minimize the influence of the human factor on the life of the company. Thanks to the Internet, many advanced users work in companies, some of whom may commit illegal actions: change account settings, remove commercially valuable data and copy them to external devices, raise VPN tunnels, etc. ... Such cases require an immediate response in order to avoid serious damage.
  
  
• Finally, we all know the problem of inventory, when analyzing, verifying and creating a registry of hardware and software takes a tremendous amount of time.

This is not a complete list of problems that system administrators and engineers have to solve every day. Meanwhile, their solution is aimed at achieving important goals for each organization. First, it is to ensure the stability and continuity of the IT infrastructure. Secondly, the effective management of software licenses. Thirdly, the maximum return on investment in the development of the fleet of hardware and software.

Tambourine: two implementations

On the market there are many programs that solve individual issues of IT infrastructure management. At Alloy Software, we initially set out to create a comprehensive solution that best meets all the needs of technical services and is able to create a single workspace for managing, monitoring and controlling IT infrastructure. We have accumulated vast experience, a lot of requirements for the system, but even this seemed to us a little - we needed the very foothold that would allow us to take into account all the nuances of administration. And we found it.

If you take up the issue of effective control and management, an ITSM (IT Service Management) approach aimed at meeting the needs of companies and its underlying ITIL methodology come to the rescue. The philosophy of this approach is to find the best combination of technologies, processes, software solutions and people used. The ITSM approach puts in the center of the entire management process the interests and needs of the client, which should be addressed by the capabilities of information technology. ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library - a set of publications containing the best practices in the management of IT services). ITIL provides guidance on the provision of quality IT services, processes, functions, and other tools necessary to support them. Moreover, these services can be directed to both external and internal customers, for example, in the case of a holding, a distributed structure, or simply a large company. ITIL uses today's popular process approach, which pays considerable attention to achieving all goals and controlling KPI.

But this was not enough for us. As a result, the Alloy Software team has created two integrated solutions that have absorbed all the global practices, but retained the most important thing - maximum customization and the ability of users to customize the system completely for themselves, taking into account all the features of the business.

Alloy Navigator is a solution for managing IT services, integrated IT infrastructure management and providing technical support to users. The main tasks that the system sketches fully cover the needs of system administrators and technical support engineers.

• Providing technical support with the mechanism for creating and servicing incidents, arranging tickets, highlighting groups of problems into separate projects.
  
  
• Management of IT assets of the company (Asset Management) - work with a list of tangible (equipment) and intangible (soft) assets, taking into account the date of their commissioning and cost.
  
  
• Software license management, software accounting based on the number of installations, compliance requirements and updates. Providing a SAM (Software Asset Management) system.
  
  
• Configuration management of individual infrastructure nodes.
  
  
• User management.
  
  
• Creation of knowledge base, work with reporting, KPI system.

Alloy Discovery is a system for collecting and processing information about computer hardware and software of a company. Alloy Discovery offers a flexible configuration of audit agents to support a variety of scenarios: single and multi-domain networks, workgroup-based networks, remote computers on the Internet, isolated networks (DMZ), computers not connected to the network. For all types of auditing, the system solves a number of key tasks.

• Collect information about computers and network devices. Collect information about printers, scanners, switches, routers and other devices using SNMP.
  
  
• Audit remote servers and computers running Windows, Linux and Mac without installing application agents.
  
  
• Automatic notification of network administrators and IT service providers in situations that require attention.
  
  
• Audit of remote networks and sites with mailing the results.
  
  
• Audit non-networked computers using removable media.
  
  
• Comprehensive inventory analysis using automatic grouping of computers and devices as you choose.
  
  
• Discovery of services, user accounts, running processes, network protocols, etc.

The experience of our customers shows that systems make IT infrastructure transparent and manageable. How exactly this happens and what role our systems play in this, we will describe in more detail on the pages of our blog. A detailed review of Alloy Discovery and then Alloy Navigator 7.0 will be released very soon. As they say, coming soon.