Concepts

The Asset Management Module is an additional NetEye feature module that allows to keep an inventory of a company’s IT infrastructure. NetEye 4 integrates a solution to provide this functionality: the server and agent part of the Open Source Software GLPI.

GLPI helps you plan and manage IT changes in an easy way, solving problems efficiently, automating business processes and gaining control over the IT infrastructure. It provides advanced features for inventory, asset and mobile devices management.

The inventory feature of GLPI serves to collect assets from multiple devices in the monitored IT environment and list them in a inventory. This functionality is granted by the GLPI Agents which send all the collected assets to the Server in the NetEye Master.

GLPI can be directly accessed from the NetEye GUI (within the Asset Management menu) using Single Sign On, with suitable permissions (see Configuration Section). Upon the first access from a user, that user will be created inside GLPI with a profile that reflects the permissions defined in NetEye.

The official, full documentation for GLPI is available directly from within its interface.

Note

If the user logs out from NetEye, its active GLPI session will be closed automatically and it will be redirected to the NetEye login page.

Note

The users will be not able to use the GLPI’s Marketplace feature, because we disable it to guarantee the integrity of the NetEye ecosystem.

Single Tenancy

The single tenancy is the most common configuration. It consists in a NetEye system, installed without Tenants or Satellite. In this case the aim of a efficient GLPI configuration consists in collecting all the assets of the IT infrastructure and inventorying them inside the main GLPI Entity.

Fig. 242 General GLPI Single Tenancy implementation.

Multi Tenancy

With the entities being configured properly, GLPI supports Multi-tenancy. The GLPI Server can be used by multiple tenants maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of the information: this feature is implemented by associating every NetEye Tenant to a dedicated GLPI Entity.

For installing the Asset Management on a Multi-tenancy environment please make sure that the Module is enabled for each particular tenant with the help of --enable-module neteye-asset option of the neteye tenant config create command for a new tenant, or neteye tenant config modify command for an existing tenant.

The general Multi-tenancy implementation, as described in the Fig. 243 is reached by having a GLPI Entity “Entity tenant A” associated to the NetEye “Tenant A”. Assets are sent by the GLPI Agent that belongs to the same Tenant authenticated through Basic auth and, if no rules are applied in GLPI, Assets are directly sent in the correct Entity.

Fig. 243 General GLPI Multi-tenancy implementation.

The possibility of adding custom rules in GLPI for associating defined assets to a specific entity remains valid. The following example displayed in Fig. 244 shows how, applying an inventory tag to a certain inventory and defining a GLPI rule that associates the tag to a specific sub-entity, GLPI rules are still applied for custom entity association.

Fig. 244 Rules are applied to associate an inventory tag with a specific GLPI Entity.

In order to maintain the separation of multiple Tenants, GLPI Agents are not allowed to import inventories to entities or sub-entities that don’t belong to the same Tenant. The Fig. 245 shows an example where a GLPI Agent tries to import an inventory with a tag that associates the inventory to another Tenant.

Fig. 245 The GLPI Agent is not allowed to upload inventories to entities for which is not associated to.

Communication through a Satellite

In the case GLPI Agents cannot reach the Master directly due to traffic or accessibility restrictions, a NetEye Satellite can be used as a Proxy to forward all the assets collected by the GLPI Agent. As described in Fig. 246, GLPI Agents perform inventories and send them to the NetEye Satellite which forwards the communication to the NetEye Master. In a Multi-tenancy environment, the Satellite should belong to the same tenant of the GLPI Agents.

Fig. 246 The GLPI Agents use a NetEye Satellite as a proxy to send assets to NetEye Master.