Detect all computers on a network and their stats

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ripken204

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 24, 2007
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I am looking for a program that can detect all of the windows computers on the network and report back data such as IP address, computer name, cpu, memory, hdd, OS, etc

This is for a business.
Even if I have to install a small program on each computer, that would be fine, but I would like to be able to monitor each computer from one central computer.
 
Another option is Spiceworks. I find it to be a bit clunky but it has some pretty decent reporting and network utilities... that's if you want some other options.
 
Nagios

Note this requires a good bit of setup but allows you to monitor just about anything you can think of.
 
We use lansweeper here where I am. Very good program.
 
m1abram said:
Nagios

Note this requires a good bit of setup but allows you to monitor just about anything you can think of.
Click to expand...

Nagios is nice (use it with Centreon to make it easier to configure and view stats), but that won't do anything that he wants. It won't autofind devices or report on all that stuff.


I use OCS and GLPI for inventory. one of the features of OCS is that you can have it set for what they call ipdiscover, it will pick a few computers on your network and have them do full scans of your entire IP range to find new devices. You can this push the client to the new computers found and then it will give you all that stuff. not as automatic as you want, but free if that is the price range you are looking for. I use that feature to monitor unwanted devices that pop up.
 
Exavior said:
Nagios is nice (use it with Centreon to make it easier to configure and view stats), but that won't do anything that he wants. It won't autofind devices or report on all that stuff.


I use OCS and GLPI for inventory. one of the features of OCS is that you can have it set for what they call ipdiscover, it will pick a few computers on your network and have them do full scans of your entire IP range to find new devices. You can this push the client to the new computers found and then it will give you all that stuff. not as automatic as you want, but free if that is the price range you are looking for. I use that feature to monitor unwanted devices that pop up.
Click to expand...

It will report on "all that stuff" and much more. You just have to set it up. No it will not auto-find the machines, however any network sniffer can do that. It seems he needs something to monitor the health of machines and probably the software running on them. Nagios will do that very well.
 
m1abram said:
It will report on "all that stuff" and much more. You just have to set it up. No it will not auto-find the machines, however any network sniffer can do that. It seems he needs something to monitor the health of machines and probably the software running on them. Nagios will do that very well.
Click to expand...

Most of that stuff you are giving it that so that isn't going to be very helpful then. You can't just hand it an IP address and have it do the rest, you need to know head of time what the machine's OS is for you to pull the correct stuff. Getting the CPU, memory and hard drive usage.. all that requires you to know everything about the machine to start with. You need to know its IP to set it up, you need to know what OS it is to know which commands to use for CPU and for memory. In the case of RAM depending on the version of windows you are dealing with would determine which value you need to check for that. Then you need to know which drive letters (or in the case of Linux what the various mount points are). Of course all of that also requires that you have SNMP enabled on every computer to begin with, which means that you have to preprep every computer for this (which could be done via group policy), which if you are doing that then you don't have a need to detect anything as you would already know about them.

I like what can be done with Nagios / Centreon. I use it to do a lot of monitoring. Mostly for stuff that I had to custom write my own plugins for. I have mine to setup normal things like windows and Linux server, a few switches and routers, then move to stuff like SNMP devices monitoring temperature of building and having events setup to turn a secondary AC unit off and on when needed using a IP contact relay, have it monitoring various chargers for backup power, various telephony devices that require me to log into a console connection, run some commands, parse the output and then sent out alerts based on the feedback. that said, when it comes to an automatic system that can go out, find devices, then report all the data about that device, not so much. In theory you could have a nagios plugin that has a list of known devices, have it check the network for new devices, then do SNMP queries to get all the info it could need for the device. based on its results have it then append the config files to automatically create the correct host and services for that device. then restart the Nagios process and reload all the config files after it has finished its run. Run that once every 6 or 12 hours, whatever is long enough for it to scan the entire network. Guess that would be an automatic way of doing this. but still don't really think that would be a good fit for this.
 
Unless there is something with Nagios that i'm mising then in a way yes. You can't use WMI to create services. Or is there something that I'm missing where you just tell it host IP is 1.1.1.1 and it will query the host, pull everything you need and then create a service for monitoring the cpus, and one for the correct value for RAM, then one for every hard drive you have in the system,....

Have I been doing something the wrong way in configuring may server since I've been having to do all that manualy by creating a service to monitor driver letter C and driver letter D...?
 
Cmustang87 said:
Another option is Spiceworks. I find it to be a bit clunky but it has some pretty decent reporting and network utilities... that's if you want some other options.
Click to expand...

MikeTrike said:
Here's another:
http://www.spiceworks.com/
Click to expand...

i tried spiceworks, sure it is free and has ad's and crap, but it is slow, at least when i used it, clunky, busy, not well laid out, i coughed up the $200 for lansweeper and never looked back!
 
MrGuvernment said:
i tried spiceworks, sure it is free and has ad's and crap, but it is slow, at least when i used it, clunky, busy, not well laid out, i coughed up the $200 for lansweeper and never looked back!
Click to expand...

It does not offer good real time monitoring either. Holds on to old information forever, if a pc has an issue then it sticks around in spiceworks for ever. Automatic scanning adds multiple instances of the same pc. It would takes a lot of maintenance to be useful for health monitoring.
We use it more for the ticketing system, we run our help desk through spiceworks. It works well for that.
It can be very clunky and SLOW. But for the price it has its good features.
 
Another +1 to lansweeper. For small to medium size it is great. The report builder is also really handy.
 
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