Workstation Auditor

If you are planning any IT project requiring system changes, you need to be conscious of what might be affected within your estate.   Going with estimates or guesses will often lead to panic situations during the rollout when you realise there is something you have not taken into account.   With Workstation Auditor you have all the information you need to support your decisions, whilst keeping your projects on track.

How?

Workstation Auditor is the easiest and most effective way of getting the facts you need for budget planning, project management, insurance information and many other uses. Including:

• Multi-Site Auditing
• Over 700 Facts retrieved
• Estate Evaluation
• Easy Deployment
• Integrated Database Server
• Phenominal Reporting Capabilities

Workstation Auditor can be enhanced with additional modules, providing a single-point management solution for multi-site monitoring, management and security.

Workstation Auditor answers your questions in the simplest possible manner.   It obtains a comprehensive snapshot of your estate and presents the information using a dynamic console with an integrated reporting engine.

The Console has a number of dedicated pages for Workstation Auditor data. Click on the graphic to see a full sized view.   This view shows a single machine.   The amount of information that is available is broken down into a number of (major) tabs across, in turn these are further detailed on a set of (detail) vertical tabs.   The grid below shows the major and detail tabs' contents.


The most important question when defining your IT strategy or managing your estate is "What's out there?".   Armed with comprehensive and accurate information about your estate, you will be able to make your decisions based on fact.   Relying on old information or guesses is bound to lead to problems sooner of later.

It is all very well being able to gather reams of data about an estate, but it will only become useful when presented in ways that can be easily understood.   While the console Object View shows a single Workstation in detail, to give a more meaningful picture, Lanboss has included included three mechanisms to bring this data out for review:

Reporting System

The reporting interface within the Console caters for a vast array of reporting requirements.   As well as having over 100 pre-defined reports available, it also has a fully fledged report designer such that users can create their own custom reports.   There are three basic report types:

• Summary - Typically containing counts of instances of a given entity (like an installed application)
• List - Containing one line of detail per object
• Detail - Containing multiple lines of detail per object

The pre-defined reports cover a broad range of requirements, effectively highlighting different aspects of the collected data.   The graphic shows a typical output from the "System SMBIOS Information Detail" report.   The reporting tool is very powerful, even capable of popping up dialog boxes to refine a report detail, as found when previewing virtually all of the standard reports.   This is particularly useful when it comes to viewing detail reports and allows for reporting on objects of particular interest.   All reports can be exported to a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF and more.

Summaries

The Proxy automatically summarises data found during an Audit.   In essence, it counts the number of duplicated entries within a specified field of a table as part of its daily work. For example, the application name.   This is very useful from a reporting perspective, as most of our decisions tend to be made based on counts of things.   The auto-summarisation process was created so that operators would get summary data back almost instantaneously, rather than waiting for the SQL server go through its tables to try and count instances every time an operator needs the information.   Clicking on Result Summaries in the Reporting Tab of the Console will bring up the summaries.

The graphic shows the CPU Type Summary in the Summary Data view.   Clicking on the column headings will sort or reverse-sort by that column, this is useful to show the highest count or to switch to an alphabetic sort on the name.   The footer of all summaries shows the total count of unique descriptions and the Sum of the Counts.   In the graphic, there are 5 different CPU types and there is a total of 25 CPUs in the data.   As can be seen, the most popular is the 3.00ghz one.   The list is sorted by Description.

You can export summaries to Excel, PDF, image file, CSV, and more.   There are also two charting options that show a stacked bar or a pie chart, which are really useful for pasting into progress documents.

As with virtually all Lanboss products, Lanboss Workstation Auditor is built on the Uniboss management platform.   The Workstation Auditor has a single Child Module that runs as a service on the workstations.   It is a read-only agent that gathers up to 700 facts about the machine configuration and its running state.   An audit can contain the following types of information:

• Hardware Platform including CPU, Memory, SMBIOS, local partitions (all types) and more
• Operating System covering all manner of service packs and hotfixes, services, device drivers etc
• Windows owner information, Product ID and installation/activation key
• Installed applications and application suites
• Track the number of unique workstation images used across the estate
• Network Configuration of the machine including shares and users thereof
• Network Connections the user has in place
• The printing environment
• Registry information
• File Information by category
• User sessions on this machine
• Global system scanning for details like UNC references etc
• Estate Valuation.

With the above, a lot can be deduced about an estate very quickly, it is often from here that a lot of projects will be spawned.   Over installation of applications, lack of patching, locally stored files and more are typical issues found.

Specific system requirements information can be found in the Uniboss section.