04. 04. 2024
Bug Fixes
06. 12. 2023
Mirko Morandini
Asset Management, Service Management
Würth Phoenix is a GLPI Gold Partner! Exclusive News from GLPI Partner Day
The popular open source software suite GLPI, an acronym for Gestionnaire Libre de Parc Informatique, has been part of the NetEye ecosystem since its beginnings, more than 15 years ago.
GLPI includes a comprehensive, pre-configured IT Asset management database, an ITIL-compliant service desk (ticketing) and feature-packed inventory agents. Within the scope of NetEye, GLPI is widely used for hardware inventory, data center management, and the management of “soft” assets such as virtual machines, licenses, contracts, and software installations.
For the automated inventory of computers, NetEye still includes a second tool called OCS. However, we now strongly recommend that you switch to GLPI’s own inventory agents – you can read about those later in this article.
With this backpack full of experience, WürthPhoenix decided to build a partnership with the main company behind GLPI, TecLib. The French company TecLib has successfully held the development leadership of GLPI since 2015, guarantees a continuous evolution of the software, has a competitive roadmap, and promotes GLPI through an international partnership program.
TecLib finances the development of this open source application with a dual approach: an “editor’s guarantee”, a 3rd level support contract for on-premise installations called “GLPI Network”, and “GLPI Network Cloud”, a fully managed, pay-per-agent cloud installation offered over SAAS. Both of them include several plugins which are not publicly available, and a guarantee on many community plugins.
From June 2023 WürthPhoenix is the first GLPI Gold Partner for both the Italian and the German (DACH) market. As such, we are entitled to provide official consulting services and training for GLPI, and to resell the GLPI on-premise contract (www.glpi-network.com) and the cloud solution (www.glpi-network.cloud).
Recently, we were invited to the GLPI partner day in Paris to celebrate 20 years of GLPI. Together with many of the now 50 international partners (of which 13 are Gold and Platinum partners) we learned about interesting use-cases, the marketing strategies and the roadmap.
Now let’s get to the news: in 2024 you can expect several new features in GLPI! For integrations with other systems, the development of a completely new REST API is under progress, and GLPI will finally be able to call webhooks for several events. I’m sure that this will enable whole new ways to exchange data between systems and to remote control external applications.
On the security side, GLPI will implement (optional) Two-Factor-Authentication for users, and an internal OAuth-Server for securing communication through the REST API and with inventory agents.
On the functional side, besides goodies such as a ticket translation helper based on DeepL, Teclib is developing, in my opinion, a real game changer: the three plugins GenericObjects, Fields, and DataInjection will be completely reworked and moved into the GLPI core. This will enable many more flexible ways for defining asset classes, and likely also the possibility to subclass the available asset types, e.g. to represent several types of computers (VMs, workstations, servers, etc.) in their own class, with their own custom fields and access permissions. Please keep in mind that this challenging extension of the GLPI core is in an early design phase and that the definitive features need still to be detailed.
Moreover, the GLPI native automatic inventory with its GLPI Agents, now in version 1.6, is steadily evolving both in terms of security (where Würth Phoenix contributed with an analysis by its renowned Sec4U cyber security team) and functionality. GLPI agents not only provide a local inventory of the computers where they were installed, but each agent is also able to act:
- as a server for the remote inventory of other systems (through SSH or WinRM)
- as a starting point for network discovery to retrieve unknown assets (using ping, arp, NetBIOS, and SNMP scanning)
- as a starting point for the detailed inventory of discovered assets (especially printers and network devices) with SNMP
- for ESX virtual machine inventories
- as a proxy for sending inventory .json files to the main server
In NetEye for an automated inventory we now recommend using GLPI agents – please refer to the NetEye Guide for specific configurations, since there are slight differences from standard GLPI (see https://neteye.guide/4.33/service-management/asset-management/configuration.html#asset-collection-methods). GLPI agents are available for most current architectures and operating systems, including Android (available on the PlayStore) and MacOSX on Intel and Apple Silicon.
Mirko Morandini
Mirko Morandini, PhD, is part of the EriZone team since 2015. As a consultant, he guided the implementation of EriZone in various projects in the DACH area and in Italy.
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