Network Inventory In Minutes

By Author: Neyda Tayner
Total Articles: 19

Many businesses discover that growth comes with some pains: as the business increases, there is a corresponding need to keep track of the growing number of computer systems aquired. The difficulty managing network inventory also increases.
In the past, IT professionals kept track of their inventory of hardware and software by visiting each individual machine, writing the data down by hand onto spreadsheets. Fortunately, many improvements have been made within operating systems, and software products have been developed to make asset management as useful and painless as possible. NEWT Professional is one such tool which has been developed to simplify and improve the process of network inventory. Since its introduction in 2003, NEWT software has gone under continuous improvement to increase its speed and data collection abilities. It is now possible to perform an audit of 100 PCs in only five minutes.
One of the things that greatly increases the speed and data collection abilities of NEWT Professional is the choice of a hybrid agent/agentless method to collect data. Using an agent means that agent software must be installed on every system the IT professional wishes to scan, and that software must be manually updated. However, going with an agentless method can be met with security errors on some of the scanned machines, and they must be individually reconfigured to correct the errors before they can be scanned. NEWT Professional's hybrid scanning method circumvents security issues that can cause agentless software to fail, while also eliminating the need to manually install agents on each individual machine to be scanned.
NEWT inventories common PC Audit data, while also providing detailed information not included in competing software packages. Some of the common data categories are CPU type, software inventory, product keys, memory, computer and monitor serial numbers, operating system, printers, hard drives, etc. The detailed deeper information include hard drive type (IDE vs SATA/SATA-II), CPU temperature, and correct identification of the monitor display type (LCD or CRT), which is a feature missing from most other software products.
NEWT Professional is available as a Free Download through the Komodo Labs website. The free version is nearly identical to the purchased version, and is able to scan up to 25 nodes for unlimited time. This allows low volume Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and other organizations with smaller networks to use the software free, without expiration. Komodo Laboratories is committed to providing small organizations a free Network Inventory.
Please visit http://www.komodolabs.com for more information.