Easily deploy Workstation Auditor for multi-site SAM

Workstation Auditor

"Lanboss has created a feature rich SAM product that allows the management of just about every auditing process a business requires." - FAST IiS

Overview

Workstation Auditor…

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

Workstation Auditor is the easiest, most effective way of getting the facts you need for budget planning, project management, insurance information and any IT project requiring system changes.

The product is extremely easy to deploy in even the largest estates, with minimal supporting hardware being required. Workstation Auditor can be enhanced with additional modules, providing a single-point management solution for multi-site monitoring, management and security.

FAST IIS

FAST IiS

When FAST IiS reviewed v4.22 of Lanboss Workstation Auditor, they liked what they saw, especially the scalability and modularity of the products. A summary of their findings follows:

Key Strengths – Technical

Slick interface, easy to learn and use.
Uses own licensed database.

Key Strengths – Commercial

Very cost effective when it comes to 3rd party requirements due to the use of its own SQL database which can support up to 10,000 users on a single system, where the standard MS-SQL approach stops at about 1,500 - thus saving on hardware costs.
One stop shop that can be enhanced with additional modules to provide a true single point solution.

Download PDF files of the FAST IiS review on the products:

Read the review on the FAST IiS site.

Console

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, rather than relying on old information or guesses, which is bound to lead to problems sooner of later. Workstation Auditor obtains a comprehensive snapshot of your estate and presents the information using a dynamic console with integrated summary and reporting facilities. The Console has a number of dedicated pages for Workstation Auditor information. Click on the graphic to see a full sized view. The example shows the data on a single machine. The information that is available has been broken down into a number of (major) tabs across, in turn these are further detailed over a set of vertical tabs. The grid below shows the major and detail tabs' contents.

Windows Detail	Hardware Detail	Applications	Networking	Volume Details	Alerts
Machine Information	General	Installed Apps	General	Usage	CPU Util High
Upgrade Readiness	Processor	Installed MS Apps	UNC List	Partitions	Volume Space running low
Users	Memory	Running Processes	Protocols		Application Used
Installed Hotfixes	Partitions	Active Setup	Servers		Application Installed
Startup Information	Disk Drives		Network Sessions		Application Removed
Services	Video		Network Shares		Network Connection Lost
	Power		Network Clients
	Devices		Network Adapters
			IP Address List
			WINS Servers

Reporting

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 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, Excel, PDF and more.

Summaries

The Proxy automatically summarises data found during an Audit. In essence, it counts the number of unique entries within a specified data field, 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.

Technical

Technical Overview

As with virtually all Lanboss products, Lanboss Workstation Auditor is built on a standard management platform, called Uniboss. 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.
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.

What Information is Retrieved?

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
A workstation Image ID is generated to identify the source image from which the machine was originally built
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.

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