#device inventory

##What a device record holds

The record exists so that a ticket, a licence question or a patch decision can be answered without finding the machine first.

Collected without anyone typing it: hostname, serial, model, platform and build, CPU, memory, disk size and health, battery cycle count on laptops, network interfaces, firmware version, installed software, patch level and last check-in.

Set by you, once: purchase date and cost, warranty end, location, assigned user, asset tag and any free-text note. These are the five minutes of data entry per device that make the automatic half useful.

##The reporting cycle

The agent reports every fifteen minutes and on three events: boot, a software install or removal, and a hardware change such as a new disk or a replaced battery.

A device that misses two cycles is marked offline with its last-seen time. Offline is informational for the first 72 hours - laptops go on holiday - and becomes an advisory after that.

infotechbang devices --offline

# hostname    last seen   assigned        note
# laptop-17   3d 4h       arjun.m         on leave until 06 Oct
# desk-04     3d 1h       meena.r         
#                                       no explanation recorded

##Installed software

Each device reports its installed packages and versions. Rolled up across the fleet, that answers the three questions people actually ask.

• Who has this? Every device with a given package, at which version.
• What is out of date? Versions behind the fleet majority, with the gap.
• What should not be here? Software outside your approved list, including the remote-access tools that tend to arrive with a contractor and stay.

##Warranty and age

Warranty end dates are entered once, at purchase or during the first audit, and then watched. You get a notice 30 days out, and the asset is flagged on the board once it lapses.

Age and disk health together produce a replacement advisory. A four-year-old machine with a healthy drive is fine; a four-year-old machine reporting reallocated sectors is a ticket waiting to happen, and it is better to meet it on a purchase order than at 9am on a Monday.

###Why this matters at renewal time

The replacement list is the one report that pays for itself. Machines past warranty, sorted by age and disk health, with the tickets each has generated in the last year attached. That is a capital request that does not need a story.

##Who has what

Devices are assigned to people, and people carry their device history. When somebody leaves, the leaver checklist already knows what to collect - a laptop, a dock, a phone, a YubiKey - because the assignment was recorded when the kit was handed over.

A device can also be assigned to a place rather than a person: a meeting room machine, a shared till, a workshop terminal. Those are tracked by location and have no leaver obligation.

##Lost and stolen

Flagging a device lost is one click and does four things, each of which is recorded against the asset.

1. The device is marked lost on the board with the time and who flagged it.
2. Open tickets against it are annotated, so nobody keeps troubleshooting a missing machine.
3. The assigned user's session revocation is queued as a suggested action for an admin to approve.
4. If the agent ever checks in again, you are told immediately, with the time and the network it checked in from.

##Devices without an agent

Printers, switches, access points, a client's own equipment, a personal phone that collects work mail. These can be added by hand with a model, serial, location, owner and warranty date, so they appear in the inventory and can carry tickets.

They will not report state, which the board makes obvious: a manual asset shows source: manual and no check-in time rather than a stale green tick.

##Limits