IT Asset Management (often referred to as ITAM) is an increasingly widespread and important practice, especially for medium and large companies. It’s the process that ensures that an organization’s physical (and not only) resources are accounted for, distributed, managed, updated and disposed of at the right time.
Assets, especially physical ones such as hardware devices, have a more or less long but limited usage time; through ITAM and with proactive management, organizations can maximize their value and anticipate obsolescence issues, seize financial opportunities for renewal and account for and manage the necessary reporting in the most appropriate way.
The importance of Asset Management
In order to provide organizations, especially public ones, with the appropriate tools to comply with regulations and meet governance and IT activity requirements also in terms of ITAM, actual standards have also been defined (such as ISO 19770).
There are many solutions and tools for Asset Management, some of which are specialized, others integrated as modules within more general tools for managing business processes, IT (such as ticketing) and more. In order for these tools to respond to the needs of the various use cases, they must be fed with real, current data, an activity that can be very expensive if not done in a synchronous and automated way.
For this reason, ThinMan offers the possibility of integrating in an automated and agnostic way (i.e. not specialized for the single tool, but generalized and adaptable to all needs) with the various Asset Management tools, offering a tool to perform monitoring and importing parameters relating to all Praim hardware/endpoints managed via ThinMan, including some software parameters (such as network configurations and firmware versions).
ThinMan and Agile will also soon allow ITAM tools to provide software inventory information about Windows devices, so as to also support analyses related to their local distribution and use and IT management in evaluating the update status as well as in patching and managing purchases and costs in terms of status and licenses’ real use/under-use, for the benefit of containing unnecessary costs. For this reason, the success of IT asset management is strongly based on centralized, accurate and updated asset data that can also come from multiple sources.
What does ThinMan and how it does it
ThinMan monitors and controls all the “powered by Praim” endpoints in the corporate infrastructure, collects detailed data and makes them available on the console, to be displayed with the specific endpoint and to be used in searches/selections or classifications that also enable automatic and/or scheduled actions. Among the data collected by ThinMan, for example, there are hardware details (CPU, RAM, disk) and model, data relating to the operating system, as well as other software parameters relating to the network configuration (addresses) and to licensing and connections configured to the VDI, including the versions of specific client software.
Overall, all this information is part of the ThinMan Inventory and, in addition to being renewed through the devices’ status in dialogue with ThinMan, can be further updated and enriched through a browse of specific networks or of the entire corporate infrastructure, controlled or timed by ThinMan. ThinMan Inventory can be exported to a file with the desired format (CSV or JSON) and it’s also possible to make the export periodic and timed through a scheduled activity with a file in a specific folder in order, for example, to create a historical archive with the company assets’ status tracked every week by ThinMan.
However, Asset Management tools need to have updated information also in real time or in any case when they are needed for ITAM process actions.
For this reason, ThinMan now allows to activate a direct integration mode by the preferred Asset Management tools, exposing REST APIs that allow to query the endpoint Inventory collected by ThinMan at any time. The most modern ITAM tools, in fact, provide methods (typically in turn APIs based on a mapping between the attributes of the available data and the information managed internally by the system) to directly integrate the available data sources and update their internal databases or repositories. Through the API Inventory, ThinMan can offer its data in a complete, agnostic and tool-independent way, thus adapting to any specific need or tool.
ThinMan API Inventory: how to use it
Activating and using ThinMan API Inventory feature is very simple. Simply access the Tools menu to the API Inventory function, enable it and select (or directly create one if there are none yet) the ThinMan users to whom you want to assign access/query privileges to the APIs.
Once the operation has been confirmed, it will be possible to query the ThinMan Web server through simple REST APIs that allow you to obtain the complete inventory of the devices tracked by ThinMan with all the related parameters, or to request updated information on a single device (or on a list of) identified through one of the possible unique IDs (such as, for example, the MAC address).
Assuming that the ThinMan Web server is available at the address <fqdn> through the API:
https://<fqdn>/api/v1/devices?
the output will be the full inventory in JSON format in “standard” mode, that is, with the most relevant and commonly used attributes indicated for each device. However, it’s also possible to request the complete details by adding the “details=full” parameter to the REST API.
All the information relating to the API Inventory and in particular the list of attributes included in the “standard” and “full” representations are available in detail in the Praim Wiki section dedicated to ThinMan: API Inventory | Wiki; Inventory API – Standard Output Fields | Wiki; Inventory API – Full Output Fields | Wiki.
To just select information about one or more devices from the Inventory, simply add the list of devices of interest identified by a unique ID and the attribute to use to search for that identifier to the API parameters. The following call:
https://<fqdn>/api/v1/devices?details=full&id=mac%2300E0C5112433 &id=mac%2300E0C5445566
for example, requests and will obtain in JSON format the inventory limited to only two devices distinguished by MAC address (attribute used for the “mac” search) respectively 00:E0:C5:11:24:33 and 00:E0:C5:44:55:66. It’s possible to search for any devices number by providing the identifiers and the information relating to those found will be returned.
It’s possible to test ThinMan REST APIs using the URLs above and entering the credentials of the enabled user, otherwise you can create your own integration script between ThinMan and your Asset Management tool that integrates the query call to ThinMan Inventory REST APIs (with attached credentials) with the import calls of your favorite tool.
ThinMan Feature Packs
The API Inventory functionality is offered by ThinMan Advanced through the ADMIN+ Feature Pack. Feature Packs are specific ThinMan usage licenses that enable advanced features. The ADMIN+ pack, in particular, includes features designed to increase security and further optimize IT administration of medium-large structured entities, characterized by staff or helpdesks groups, and with business continuity and high integration needs (external DB and backup, possibility of connecting to multiple domains via LDAP, access control lists for IT users and use of multiple ThinMan consoles, including remote ones).
All the information on ThinMan Advanced and its Feature Packs, also designed for complex networks and optimization of remote locations (NETWORK+) and for personalized, secure and advanced management of user connections (USER+), can be found at this link.
