Ascent is designed to be a comprehensive, network
and computing asset management system.
While there are a number of open source products that are designed
to track assets at a desktop/end user level, there is a
noticeable lack of higher level (eg. server/router/hub/switch/etc.)
tracking products.
What Ascent IS:
Ascent is an asset management system featuring:
- High level overview of server/network equipment complete with reporting capabilities for management types.
- Low level "nuts & bolts" information about assets, for the worker bees.
- The ability to leverage Microsoft's Active Directory for user authentication
What Ascent is NOT:
- A trouble ticketing system (at least, not in the current scope of the project)
- A desktop/laptop/end user hardware tracker. Though it could be used as such, that is not the intent.
Features:
Tracking of network and computing devices
- Network Name
- IP Information (supports multiple IP configurations/VLAN/differing subnets)
- Serial Number
- Maintenance Information (Contract Numbers, expiration dates, Support Levels, etc.)
- Location (From Country to Rack Number)
- Type of monitoring solution utilized
Assignment of devices to services (eg. host X is part of service Y)
- Many to Many relationships between Services and Hosts
- Assignment of individual contacts to a device
- Supports multiple contacts
(eg. Joe is the host contact, Tina is the Database contact, Jeff and Alice are the service contacts)
Outage Tracking
- Keeps track of scheduled outages for a particular device
- Can be used to populate Nagios with scheduled downtimes
Ascent utilizes the following open source technologies:
- PHP
- MySQL
- Apache
It is designed to be platform independent, provided the above technologies are available on the target OS. In addition, it is intended to be readily portable to other DBMS types, particularly postgresql.
Current Status:
This project is in the beginning stages of the current incarnation.
* Version 0.1 of the application has been released.
* Version 0.2 is expected to be released by the end of October 2004,
In the new version (0.2), the underlying architecture has changed
dramatically, both in directory structure, and in application
process flow.
There is not much content to it, but the SQL is complete (for now).
There is also an installation guide, and some basic documentation.
To download it, please visit the project download page.
Copyright & Notes of Gratitude
All unique content on this site, including
source code, images, and text is ©
Jason Ross, with the exception of the sourceforge logo.
The xhtml and css on this site are released under the
creative commons attribution license
.
Many thanks to the folks at Sourceforge.net for the use of their hosting facilities and development services.