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International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Systems 2009
ITS Surabaya
253
ISSN 2085-1944
NETWORK INVENTORY COLLECTION SYSTEM FOR MANAGING
AND MONITORING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ASSET
Jusak 1, Anjik Sukmaaji 2
STIKOM (STMIK) Surabaya
Jl. Raya Kedung Baruk 98, Surabaya
email : jusak@stikom.edu 1, anjik@stikom.edu 2
ABSTRACT
The growth of Information Technology investment
is predicted to develop rapidly in the next few years.
This will urge the need of a tool to help IT managers to
manage and monitor their asset frequently. IT asset
management is a part of network management with its
scopes are monitoring, controlling, and planning the
existing source and components. In this paper, we will
show that managing and monitoring the IT asset,
including configuration system, devices, storage
media, interfaces and installed applications, can be
done thoroughly by utilizing the simple network
management protocol (SNMP).
Keywords: inventory, management, monitor, snmp.
1 INTRODUCTION
The development of Information Technology in
Indonesia is growing fast. It can be seen from the
increase of the number hardware and software
investment by government or private institutions.
Moreover, it is predicted that the Information
Technology investment will reach up to 30% in the
next three years [1].
According to Subiyantoro [2], Information
Technology sector is an important development for the
economy. This recently has been strengthened by
Indonesian Government through the declaration of
National Information & Communication Technology
(ICT) Committee in December 2006.
Amid the euphoria of Information Technology
utilization, most of the decision makers have difficulty
in allocating budget for Information Technology
investment. Even though there are plenty of analysis
methods, most of institutions focuses on accountancy
based analysis like cost-benefit analysis and return on
investment [3].
In this paper, we introduce a new method for
collecting a number of assets, i.e. both hardware and
software managed by IT manager. The method is based
on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
which is running on most of current Local Area
Network (LAN) as well as Wide Area Network
(WAN) that based on TCP/IP protocol. The creation of
SNMP is fostered by the need to help corporations to
more adequately manage their network infrastructures
[4]. In recent years, the network management
community has investigated the use of more advance
technologies, including Web Services (WS) [5] and
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distribution [6]. It can be shown by
some investigations that these technologies can
significantly improve the network management process
[7]. Examples of this improvement include the ability
of building more sophisticated management systems
through Web Services composition, and the possibility
to have more scalable and highly available
management solutions using P2P systems. All of them
are built as an extension the SNMP Protocol.
We focus our investigation to the utilization of
SNMP protocol to absorb information about network
infrastructure component, including hardware and
software installed and managed in a LAN. We have
built a system called Network Inventory Collection
System (NICS) to gather a set of data representing a
number of IT investment owned by a corporate
institution.
The remaining of the paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 describes the model and the design
of the NICS system as well as exploitation of SNMP
protocol to achieve our goal. The output of the NICS
system is explained and analyzed in Section 3. Finally,
we will draw conclusion in Section 4.
2 MODEL, ANALYSIS, DESIGN, AND
IMPLEMENTATION
In this section, we will describe the model of the
NICS system and the Unified Modeling Language
(UML) design of our NICS application in term of use
case diagram.
2.1 Model of The NICS System
In general, our system can be described as in
Figure 1. NICS application server has a main task to
254 The 5th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Systems
ISSN 2085-1944
collect data from Workstation/Server and Network
Devices distributed through the local area network. In
order that the data comprising hardware and software
components is able to be absorbed by NICS application
server, it is mandatory for the Workstation/Server and
Network Devices to have SNMP agent installed. The
data is kept by the SNMP agent in a Management
Information Based (MIB). Later, the NICS application
system will query the data from the MIB from each
computer.
Workstation/
ServerAgent
SNMP
NICS
Application
Network
Inventory
Information for asset
managament
Network
Devices
Agent
SNMP
Fi
gure 1. Diagram block of the Network Inventory Collection System
(NICS)
NICS application also has the duty to store the data
in a database system and makes it available for asset
management and monitoring purposes.
The model of implementation of the NICS system
is pictured in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Implementation model of the NICS system
As can be seen from Figure 2, the NICS application
is installed inside in the SNMP Manager, while each
computer/server and network devices have SNMP
agent run on their system. SNMP manager keep the
query data in MySQL server.
SNMP manager definitely will not query the whole
object in the MIB. Instead, we only query data which
will be able to figure out the asset of IT component
installed in a LAN. For that purpose, we have defined a
set of SNMP object identification (OID) as it is shown
in Table 1.
To represent the asset of IT component installed in
a LAN of a corporate institution, we chose 5 (five)
objects which are: system, interfaces, devices, storage,
and installed software. Description of each object is
explained in Table 1.
Table 1. OID and Object Name
OID
Object
Name
Information
1.3.6.1.2.1.1.
System
sysDescr,
sysObjectID,
sysContact,
sysName,
sysLocation,
sysServices
1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1
Interfaces
InterfaceIndex,
InterfaceDesc,
InterfaceType,
InterfaceMTU,
InterfaceSpeed,
InterfaceMAC,
InterfaceInOcktet,
InterfaceOutOcktet
1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3
Devices
DeviceIndex,
DeviceType,
DeviceDesc
DeviceStatus.
1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2
Storage
StorageIndex,
StorageType,
StorageDesc,
StorageAlocationUnit,
StorageSize,
StorageUsed.
1.3.6.1.2.1.25.6
Installed
software
InstallSoftIndex,
InstallSoftDesc,
InstallSoftType,
InstallSoftUpTime
2.2 Use Case Diagram of The NICS
Application
Figure 3 shows a graphical overview of the
functionality provided by a NICS system in term of
actors, their goal (represented by use case) and any
dependencies between those use cases.
As can be seen from the figure, User is an actor to
represent someone who has access to use the NICS
system. Once the NICS application executed, the NICS
application will scan through the whole network by
utilizing SNMP Protocol. This process is handled by
use case MIBs search and MIBs exploration. SNMP
agent is also an actor that searches detailed information
255
D09 – Network Inventory Collection System For Managing
And Monitoring Information Technology Asset - Jusak
ISSN 2085-1944
of the workstation/server and network devices and
keeps the information in the MIB. Data which contains
information about hardware and software component
of each computer/server and network devices, as a
result of MIB search, is then filtered and collected by
the NICS application in its database and is available
for the user.
User
SNMP Agent
NICS Operations
MIB Search
MIB Exploration
Network Node S/W Info
Network Node H/w Info
Node Data History
<<include>>
<<include>>
<<include>>
<<include>>
<<extend>>
<<extend>> <<extend>>
Figure 3. Use Case diagram of the NICS application.
Database design of the NICS and relation of each
table are shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Database design of the NICS.
3 RESULT
In this section we will show some output forms of
the NICS application comprising of 5 (five) objects
that have been defined in the model. Figure 5 is a result
of query to the OID 1.3.6.1.2.1.1. which represents
description of the system, such as processor type, owner of
the workstation, up-time, etc.
Figure 5. Query result of object: system
The query result of the interface description is
shown in Figure 6, including interface type, maximum
speed of the interface, current traffic in and out.
Figure 6. Query result of object: interface
The third trial query that should be done by the
NICS system is description about device connected to
the workstation/server. For example, the query result
that contains description about device can be seen in
Figure 7.
Figure 7. Query result of object: Devices
The figure shows that all devices that are connected
to a workstation/server can be detected by the NICS
system. This information will be very useful for IT
managers to manage and to estimate the number of
asset reside in their institution.
Fourthly, we will show the query result of object
Storage in Figure 8. The figure shows that information
about storage capacity as well as the usage of the
storage can be provided by NICS system. In Figure 9
we show that monitoring to a certain workstation/
server or network devices can be done easily by
comparing the capacity and the usage of the storage.
256 The 5th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and Systems
ISSN 2085-1944
Figure 8. Query result of object: Storage
Figure 9. Monitoring of storage capacity and usage
Lastly, the NICS system is also able to provide
information about installed application software as
well as the operating system. The query result of the
application software is shown in Figure 10.
Figure 8. Query result of object: Installed Software
4 CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
We have shown that network management system
that we have proposed in this paper is able do
managing and monitoring process of all IT assets in a
corporate institution that has LAN installed. By
employing SNMP protocol, we were able to develop a
set of information useful for predicting the number of
IT assets automatically. If this data is kept and
analyzed for several years, an IT manager will also be
able to predict the number of investment that should be
done in the next few years.
The Simple Network Management Protocol
(SNMP) is still the the facto TCP/IP network
management solution. However, we also realize that
this solution is not sufficient when it is applied to the
current computer networks that are connected to the
Internet where it became a fragmented network with
the introduction of NATs and firewalls. This will
prevent the network administrators to find and access
devices from other remote administrative domains. To
accommodate this issue, in the future, we plan to
introduce the use of web services and peer-to-peer
technology in our NICS system.
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