10.3 Collecting Software and Hardware Inventory
When you inventory a device, ZENworks Asset Management collects both software and hardware information from the device. Using ZENworks Control Center, you can view the inventory for an individual device, or you can generate reports for multiple devices based on specific criteria.
You can use the software inventory for a variety of purposes, including tracking usage of specific applications and ensuring that you have sufficient licenses for all copies of the application being used. For example, assume that your company owns 50 licenses of a word processing software. You do a software inventory and find that it is installed on 60 devices, which means that you are out of compliance with your license agreement. However, after viewing the usage reports for the software for the past 6 months, you see that it is actually being used on only 45 devices. To become compliant with the license agreement, you uninstall the software from the 15 devices that are not using it.
You can use the hardware inventory for a variety of purposes as well, including ensuring that your hardware meets the requirements for running specific software. For example, assume that your Accounting department wants to roll out a new version of their accounting software. The new software has increased processor, memory, and disk space requirements. Using the hardware inventory collected from your devices, you can create two reports, one that lists all devices that meet the requirements and one that lists the devices that don’t meet the requirements. Based on the reports, you distribute the software to the compliant devices and create an upgrade plan for the noncompliant devices.
By default, devices are automatically scanned at 1:00 a.m. the first day of each month. You can modify the schedule, as well as many other configuration settings, on the tab in ZENworks Control Center.
The following sections provide instructions for initiating a device scan and using the collected inventory:
10.3.1 Initiating a Device Scan
You can initiate a scan of a device at any time.
-
In ZENworks Control Center, click the tab.
-
Navigate the Servers or Workstations folder until you locate the device you want to scan.
-
Click the device to display its details.
-
In the task list located in the left navigation pane, click or to initiate the scan.
The QuickTask Status dialog box displays the status of the task. When the task is complete, you can click the tab to view the results of the scan.
To scan multiple devices at one time, you can open the folder in which the devices are located, select the check boxes next to the devices, then click > .
You can also use the inventory-scan-now command in the zman utility to scan a device. For more information, see Inventory Commands
in the ZENworks 11 Command Line Utilities Reference.
10.3.2 Viewing a Device Inventory
-
In ZENworks Control Center, click the tab.
-
Navigate the Servers or Workstations folder until you locate the device whose inventory you want to view.
-
Click the device to display its details.
-
Click the tab.
The Inventory page provides a summary of the hardware inventory. To see detailed inventory information, click .
10.3.3 Generating an Inventory Report
ZENworks Asset Management includes several standard reports. In addition, you can create custom reports to provide different views of the inventory information.
-
In ZENworks Control Center, click the tab.
-
In the Inventory Standard Reports panel, click .
-
Click the report to generate the report.
Using the options at the bottom of the report, you can save the generated report as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, CSV (comma-separated values) file, PDF file, or PDF Graph file.
10.3.4 Where to Find More Information
For more information about inventory, see the ZENworks 11 Asset Inventory Reference.