1 Key Features. Audit, Discovery and Software Licence Manager Guide

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1 Audit, Discovery and Software Licence Manager Guide SupportDesk Audit and Discovery module provides IT inventory management for your helpdesk plus an IT asset management module to audit, analyse and report on your company's hardware and software. There is also an optional module called the Software Licence Manager, which provides compliance information based on the licences declared, and the licences found from the audit. 1 Key Features Bulk population of the helpdesk with audited files Detect new and missing PCs Hardware auditing of processors, cpu mhz, memory, disks, network adapters etc. Software auditing of detected applications, domains etc. Built-in remote control desktop management Run TCP/IP ping and event viewer from the desktop Full suite of management reports, including software licensing Licence compliance information. If your system has been purchased with the Audit option, there will be an entry in the Help About screen indicating the number of allowable audits. The screen below shows a system that has been configured for 100 Audits and Software Licence Manager (SLM). Figure 1: Help About screen Before starting, please check that there is a subdirectory beneath the SupportDesk installation share called auditor and contains the files below. 1

2 Figure 2: Auditor files It may be that your directory does not contain psexec, this cannot be shipped by House-on-the-Hill but may be downloaded by the customer and copied into this directory. If this file is not present, some of the Discovery features will be disabled. Supaudit.csv is a simple CSV file used by SupportDesk to determine what types of file to include in the audit, a typical example would be,,,*.exe, which instructs SupportDesk to look for files with the.exe suffice only. Supaudit.ini contains configuration information for SupportDesk. Supaudith.exe is the actual file that carries out the audit but does so hidden with no display to the end user. Supaudit.exe a variation on supaudith.exe but, if used, the end user is shown a html screen of the audit findings. There may be other files in this directory that are created by the audit process; these can be ignored. 2 Configuring and Running the Audit function The Audit function is accessed from the Menu Setup PC Auditing. Figure 3: Audit Menu selection Which on selection will bring up the screen below and show audited PCs plus the last audit date and discovered owner (the last user to logon prior to the audit). 2

3 Figure 4: Audited Computer Details With a configuration tab of Figure 5: Audit Configuration As a starting point to begin auditing please set the options on your configuration tab as shown above, but with the following key differences: 1. The UNC Path will be specific to your site and should be the sharename of the supportdesk directory\auditor. After making any changes to the settings, please hit the Close button to save your settings. 2. The user name to connect to remote PCs should be a network domain logon that has access to all computers. It may be that you need to prefix this with your domain name e.g.: Houseonthehill\Administrator This is the account that will be used to connect to PCs in the domain and initiate the audit application during the Discovery and Audit process. 3

4 A quick test of the Audit process is to return to the Audited Computer Details and select the option Audit my PC an MS-DOS window will appear which indicates the audit is running. On completion, a web page/html document will be displayed showing the findings of the audit. The file/computer name will appear on the screen. Figure 6: Audit Findings This htm document is stored in the auditor directory and can be accessed at any time if a quick view of the computer detail is needed. The details of the audit are initially stored in a text file that has to be imported into SupportDesk. To do this Click on the option Load Audit PC Files and the data held in the text file will be loaded into SupportDesk. 3 Accessing the Audited Information The information from the audit can be accessed from various areas of SupportDesk. 1. From the audit screen double clicking on any of the audited PCs in the list will show the htm document that summarises the information. Figure 7: Audit htm file 3. From the Explorer menu the CMDB option can be expanded and show the CI summary on the summary panel. There are also several built in list by options that let the user quickly change the data in the CI summary. 4

5 Figure 8: Selecting List Options Selecting any of the items in the summary screen shows a screen with the basic CI information. Figure 9: CI Details And more information on in the Extra Fields Tab. 5

6 Figure 9: CI Extra Fields From the Tabs at the bottom of the screen, more information about the CI is available in particular the Configuration Tab which allows display of different categories of information using the offered dropdown. Figure 10: CI Configuration If the Software Licence Manager is enabled the Licenced Software tab is available and shows the software discovered on that machine. 6

7 Figure 11: CI Licenced Software 4 CI Information within the Call Taking Process If the CI field is included in the Call screen, SupportDesk has the capability to show the CI associated with the User for whom the Call is being logged. (The audit will assume that the last logon to the machine is the User). The information SupportDesk actually shows in the CI dropdown can be controlled through a set of options on the Company Configuration screen. Figure 12: Call Product List Configuration Figure 13: Call Details A click on the CI hyperlink on the Call screen will take the user to the CI forms that have been shown earlier in this document. 5 Initiating Audits of the IT Estate To audit an estate there are various options. 7

8 1. Add code to your login scripts to execute supaudit.exe in the shared directory. This will create an audit file and write it to the auditor directory for loading into SupportDesk. If a blind audit is required (one in which there is no visible display to the end user) then the supaudith.exe file should be used. 2. Visit each PC, navigate to the auditor directory on the Supportdesk Share and fire off the supaudit.exe file manually. 3. Visit each PC with a memory stick containing the supaudit.exe file and the supaudit.ini file. Navigate to the memory stick and fire off the supaudit.exe file. The resulting audit file will be written back to the memory stick and can be transferred back to the appropriate directory later for loading into SupportDesk. 4. If the psexec file is installed in the auditor directory the option to Discover Computers in my Domain is active and SupportDesk will attempt to discover and audit any PC s on the network. Key to this feature working is the existance of a network logon that has access to every PC. 5. A batch file can be written that calls supaudit.exe from the share and starts the audit. This can be loaded on all machines and scheduled using the Windows scheduler. Once one/many PCs have been audited the files can be loaded manually from the Audit Screen, or this task can be automated using the SupportDesk Workflow Engine also known as the Escalator. There is a tick option on the configuration screen of the Workflow Engine to enable this. Figure 14: Workflow Configuration 6 Using the Software Licence Manager The SupportDesk Licence manager makes use of the information collected by the Audit process. It allows users to build up a set of records that provide information on the number of discovered software packages, and compares this with the entered number of valid licences. A traffic light colour coding indicates the compliance discovered by SupportDesk. Red in the case where there are more licences than declared. Green for compliance with licences to spare, and Yellow for exact compliance. Figure 15: Software Licence Summary The Licence Manager is accessed from the Explorer menu on the left hand side of the Windows UI, with other options that provide immediate views of the software licences. 8

9 Figure 16: Licence Manager Selection To create a new Licence Record the user should select New Software Licence which opens the screen below. Figure 17: Licence Details Although there are many data fields available, a new Licence record can be created with very little data. In the case of a simple Licence record for one version of software, the user only needs to give the Licence a meaningful name, then select the Manufacturer, Product and Version from the options available. Figure 18: Licence Details Input The data shown in these dropdowns is from that discovered and loaded into SupportDesk from audited machines. The screen will automatically show the number of Discovered licences of the specified software, and the actual PC that the software is on can be seen using the Discovered CIs Tab. 9

10 By entering the number of licences that your company actually has in the Licence Record SupportDesk will then indicate compliance or otherwise. To create a licence that encompasses multiple versions of a software product, it is possible to maintain a Parent Licence record, which then has many Child licences associated. This is done by using the Add option at the bottom of the Licence dialog screen. Multiple Child licences can be produced with the net number of discovered CI s shown on the parent screen. To accommodate the eventuality of CIs having multiple versions users should select the Unique option on the Licence screen which will then simply show the number of unique CI s with the software. QuickReports can be used to create a bespoke report on the Licence compliance as shown below. Figure 19: Licence Report Creation Which will generate report in the style shown below. Figure 20: Licence Report Output Reports can also be generated against the individual software records that have been captured by the audit process. In this case, the Database to be specified in the QuickReport Designer would be Lic.Software and typical fields as shown below. 10

11 Figure 21: Licence Report Fields Using the Search For option in Quick Reports it is also easy to filter the report to just the Software of interest. Thus, using the parameters shown here, we have specified to Search for Sourcesafe Figure 22: Report Filtering This provides a report similar to that shown below. Figure 23: Report Output As well as automatically importing audit files, the SupportDesk Workflow Engine can also be configured to check compliance. If any failures are detected an will be sent to the address on the Company configuration screen. 11