Pandemic has changed the working style of business, you no longer need a brick and mortar office or call employees to work. Employees are working from home effectively, only you need to provide them a laptop and other assets to do their job. The new style is effective and the need of the hour but at the same time auditing the assets physically becomes a pain. Asset audit in the covid period ? How auditors will verify the assets, how will they take care of compliance as compliance like Caro clause 4i has not changed.

Here are a few things you can do

Method 1: Manual Method

Asset audit in the covid period
You can prepare a list of all the assets with users using the mail and merge the function of the excel tool and then send it to all the users to revert with the confirmation of assets. You need to manually verify each mail and collate the data for the final report.

All mismatched data need to be updated in the finance record and the same mails can be stored for future reference.

Method 2:

Use ITM automation tool that has an inbuilt feature of automating the process of audit using three combinations. One by email verification and report generation. Second, using the ITM mobile app with an inbuilt GPS-based camera and date & time stamp on each photo.

This helps the companies to reduce the overall efforts required for audit and at the same time manage the compliance.

What KPMG says?

Asset audit in the covid period

Due to various restrictions imposed currently as part of measures to combat the COVID-19 outbreak, in certain

cases, it could be difficult for auditors to physically attend the inventory count organized by a company. In that case, management would need to demonstrate controls over inventory movements and an auditor should be able

to test and place reliance on them.

Auditors would need to perform alternative audit procedures to obtain audit evidence as to the existence and condition of inventory, for example, observing

a current physical inventory count and reconciling it to the opening inventory quantities or inspection of

documentation of the subsequent sale of specific inventory items acquired or purchased prior to the physical inventory counting.

If the challenges persist and auditors are not able

to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence by performing alternative procedures, then depending on the pervasiveness of the scope limitations, this may

result in a modification of opinion in an auditor’s report.

If auditors had attended the last inventory count, then management would need to provide information to help auditors perform roll forward procedures. Roll forward procedures for the intervening period may include, among others, the following:

• Vouching purchases of inventory during the intervening period to and from perpetual records
• Vouching sales of inventory during the intervening period to and from perpetual records
• Performing substantive analytical procedures to evaluate sales, gross margin percentages, inventory turnover, and/or days sales in inventory
• Testing inventory sales and purchases for proper cut-off at period end
• Testing the accuracy of the inventory reconciliation to the general ledger at period end, including tests of reconciling items.

An auditor would need to consider whether roll-forward procedures could provide sufficient appropriate audit

evidence. Generally, as the length of the roll-forward period increases, the persuasiveness of the audit evidence the previous inventory count combined with roll-forward procedures provides for the existence of physical inventory quantities at the reporting date

decreases. This is because an auditor can only sample transactions that were recorded during the roll-forward period, and there is a risk that inventory movements may not have been recorded. This risk increases as the roll-forward period get longer. In addition, roll-forward procedures do not provide evidence as to the condition of inventory at the reporting date.

Use of technology in inventory count

In certain situations where physical attendance by auditors is not possible, they may be able to observe the count remotely via video call with the help of technology. An auditor would need to ensure the security of these applications. The auditors would need to understand the technological and practical constraints to observing an inventory count remotely. If auditors are observing a count remotely, they would need to perform the same procedures as if attending in person. Asset audit in the covid period

The post Asset Auditing during the Pandemic appeared first on IT Asset Management Software.

Asset management is the process of monitoring and maintaining assets cost-effectively. The assets include all elements of software and hardware that are found in the business environment. Asset management is also called inventory management because It gathers all the hardware and software information. So that you can save money by avoiding unnecessary asset purchase. It also promotes the harvesting of existing resources. For an efficient asset management, you should know about the core process which is the lifecycle of asset management.

Asset Management Lifecycle

Asset Lifecycle Management is the process of optimizing the profit, generated by your assets, throughout its lifecycle. The lifecycle of an asset usually contains the several sequences of stages. In simple term lifecycle of asset management is nothing but the life of an asset, from its first establishment through its acquisition, operation and any maintenance or upgrading, to its disposal. Asset lifecycle will allow the company to figure out the desired future condition and help make decisions about attaining this condition in terms of both tasks and costs.

Asset management- States

There are 4 main states in the asset management. They are as follows.

1. Planning
2. Procurement
3. Maintenance
4. Disposition

1.Planning

Planning in asset management is to ensure necessary services and facilities of an organization where a number of assets are co-dependent and required to work together to deliver an agreed standard of service. Knowing the condition of all given assets will be a challenge. But it is necessary to understand what state the assets are currently in to perform their intended function.

2.Procurement

Procurement involves the process of selecting vendors, establishing payment terms, strategy selection, the negotiation etc. It is used to obtain new assets for the company based on the decision made in planning state. It offers the ability to perform the following functions.

•    Sourcing activities
•    Negotiation
•    Create and manage purchase orders
•    Create and manage transfer orders
•    Receive assets

3.Maintenance

Maintenance is the process of improving the availability, safety, reliability and quality of the assets you have and it is the continuous process. In your business, all the pieces of equipment are not equally important and not all require the same degree of maintenance. This is a very complicated state when it comes to the large organization. Maintenance itself contains the upgrade state for its efficient function.

4.Disposal

A disposal is an act of getting rid of the assets. It is required to have a report, which has the identification of all destroyed equipment, what date it was destroyed, and the exact process taken during the process. This process needs to be done by someone who knows what they are doing. Because this process might require multiple scrubbings, and it is important to audit the equipment between scrubbings to assure all the data is gone.

There are many different approaches that you have to mix and match in your organization, depending on your assets, the size etc. Effective and efficient asset management practices only can help to deliver the desired outcome. So, it is essential to have a software which ensures proper upgrading, replacement and disposal of an asset. Yes, with asset management software only this will become possible. The following challenges of the various department can make you understand it more deeply.

Challenges

Every department has its own challenges. Asset management comes up to overcome all these challenges within your organization. Here we are going to see about the two departments that have the higher chance of getting a challenge in asset management.

Information Technology

IT infrastructure is nothing but a bunch of hardware and software equipment or assets. Of course, there are a ton of configurations, connections and customizations that will make IT work for the business. Let’s list out some top challenges in this department.

• Inventory management

The biggest challenge of the small organization is they don’t have a good asset inventory. Without an inventory, you may miss vital information on what exists on your network and who owns what assets etc. Asset information management will be more challengeable if you are using an excel sheet or any home-grown tools.

• Changing nature

Any piece of IT equipment whether it is hardware or software has an expiry date. Then you have to replace the current one which is going to expire. Tracking and keeping changes in asset equipment, and repairs/changes done on assets become almost impossible without an asset management system.

• Budget blindness and prediction

When you do not know what exists in your IT infrastructure, it becomes harder to determine what to buy and how many to buy, because you don’t know what is in stock. It is one of the difficult tasks to identify the real need. If you knew what you have, who has what, what is in use, the existing asset expiry date, then only you will be able to make decisions about the procurement of new equipment and software.

• Helpdesk management

Most of the trouble tickets are related to IT assets (either hardware or software). Without sufficient information about the history of the tickets, you have to spend a lot of time to figure this out each and every time. This slows down service request resolution and makes the help desk management process more challenging.

Human resources

Human Asset Management is the part of the company that manages human assets. Human Assets are part of the Intangible assets of the company. Some of the important challenges of the HR department are

• Competency profiling 

It is about translating the overall strategy into competencies, which need for overall, each function and level.

• Development Planning 

It is all about ensuring that the employees have the necessary competencies to meet strategic objectives.

• Talent Asset Management 

It is now for almost everyone including retention activities. Also useful for identification of future top performers based on department.

• Performance Management 

It is about translating hard and soft overall targets into measurable objectives.

We have already seen the asset management complete lifecycle and the various challenges of the departments. Now, this is the time to optimise the asset management system.

How to optimize the Asset management?

Asset management optimization is the methodology of making asset management as fully perfect, functional and effective. There are some important aspects to optimize the asset management. They are as follows

• Business model

The major responsibility of the asset management is to make sure the model remains relevant to its clients. Business models must become digital. That means it must incorporate with the trending technology such as robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

• Data virtualization

Efficient and accurate sorting of data, what is used by which function, which quality and in which frequency can help to introduce concepts like data virtualisation where business rules and data hubs will bring sufficient flexibility in the data and information management.

• Alternative investments

One strategy that is gaining the most attention is alternative investments. An alternative investment is not one of the conventional investment types such as stocks, bonds and cash etc. Alternative investments include private equity, hedge funds, commodities and infrastructure. So, it is one of the very important aspects used to optimise the asset management.

• Better risk management

The risk is decision making here. Better risk management can increase the probability of making the right decision at the right time. The risk associated with meeting commitments can also reduce through the probability of achieving target service levels agreements.

• Operational excellence

Operational excellence remains key to optimize asset management. The major cost elements of any business within operations are the essential components, which cannot lightly be scaled back. Ultimately, a very high level of event-based processing, combined with exception-based working and straight through processing can lead to increase the levels of operational excellence.

The post Asset Management Lifecycle Optimization & Procurement Management appeared first on IT Asset Management Software.

Keeping track of the machines isn’t just a 9 to 5 desk job responsibility that a business can assign and forget. It’s an essential enterprise task that facilitates hardware and software management, license compliance, regulatory compliance, and security. However, most of the enterprises say a strict NO to discuss the topic. But, the fact is, very few organizations today have a thorough understanding of what is on their networks at any given time. It’s not hard to fathom why, of course. Remote access, the increasing proliferation of mobile devices, contractors with network access, reorganizations, employee transfers, system and space redesign, new installations, system retirements ­ let’s just term it `network evanescence’. This state of affairs occurs when devices appear and disappear on the network more quickly than their presence or absence can be discovered through scanning techniques. Enterprises today should take real control of the computing environment by starting from ground zero with relatively mundane tasks of simply knowing everything that is on the network. Which itself, to start off with, is a complex task given the portentous stretch network infrastructure. Although asset management is typically practiced by large corporations and government agencies, small businesses still have a lot to benefit as well. Being able to keep track of all of your company’s assets is essential to knowing where they have been allocated and to be able to properly identify loss, if and when it occurs.`N’ number of solutions have encroached the market to help businesses focus on their business and not on their assets. Even if we thank an asset management solution’s network inventory tools that shows the computers in an organization, what about the other network devices and appliances? The solution one chooses should be able to locate every IP device on the network, including any computer that does not have the client agent installed, providing a 100 percent audit every time. Enterprise asset management just did the same

ITM IT Asset Management partners with Dell as OEM to provide unique solution for Asset Management.

(Mumbai, India, May 9, 2018) — IT Asset Management (ITAM) Software Market Study Report covers the current situation and the development forecasts of the IT Asset Management (ITAM) Software

ITM, a cloud-based asset management software. In the field of IT asset management, ITM indicates that this technology can save up to a million dollars. Asset tracking helps technical administrators make critical decisions, identify and remove bottlenecks, and reduce costs. The IT inventory tool is backed by over 15 years of experience in fields such as security, counterfeiting technologies and infrastructure, which help integrate IT departments within their organizations. Quality assurance is guaranteed, and the company enjoys a partnership with Balabit, Anydesk, Dell OEM.

ITM has been awarded Best Software Development Company 2018 – India & Innovation Award in Asset Management Software – India  by CV Magazine

TOP Enterprise Asset management software by CIO- Review

“We are a young and creative team, and innovate regularly to introduce new products and services to the industry. Our aim is to make our clients’ business grow with modern tools, be it web solutions, asset tracking, license provision or setting up of social networks and security solutions,” said Bharat Gupta, CEO, Greenitco Technologies.

ITM is using innovation to make asset auditing just a five stage process using bar codes. ITM ensure smooth communication, and monitors and manages assets from planning to disposal, along with a status board and downtime tracker, even for offline assets, on a real time basis. Customer feedback is captured using a ‘happiness meter’. IT departments can thus monitor their cost per user and take appropriate measures.

As a user case of a travel industry player indicates, ITM assisted it in managing over 5,000 assets and improved service delivery and reporting services. The outcome was a simple yet strong interface, and reduction in costs of unused licenses.

Target audience of the Global IT Asset Management Software Market Research report:

• Newbie/ Investors
• A Startup Firm and Venture Capitalists or Well-Established Firms
• Marketing departments of brands/products,
• Government Associations
• Analysts and Strategic Business Planners
• Global IT Asset Management Software Manufacturers, Suppliers and Distributors
• Real estate developers
• Global IT Asset Management Software Research Centers
• End-Use Industries
• Enterprise Asset management

Article Source : CIO Review

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If you have decided to cut down the cost on assets purchased on different geographies or want to manage assets and licenses centrally to have better negotiations with vendors, here is the complete process you can manage effectively. Here are some facts

• The cost of  hardware and software assets constitute a large % of the total global IT budget
•   As a result, it’s critical that IT is able to consistently and accurately report on these assets
•   Good asset reporting is not only important for managing the IT budget but is critical to ensuring that risk to Organization associated to audit/compliance from external vendors is mitigated
•   IT asset reporting is inconsistent which creates general challenges

• Anytime procurement and finance requires asset information it requires a significant amount of effort to coordinate the collection of information within IT
• Very complicated to manage software licensing across the various countries making it difficult to both coordinate vendor audits and negotiate global software purchasing agreements

How to manage assets in large organization

Phase 1 – Information Collection

Phase 2 – Finding right tool

Phase 3 – Data Importing & Integration

Phase 4 – Define new process

Phase 5 – Handover/closure

Phase 1: information collection Objective and scope

• Generate a set of standard asset reports and associated processes
•   These standard reports and processes will include

• Reports available to management on a consistent basis
• Standard tool/system for reporting
• Reporting on a standard set of information for all assets
• Consistent process for collecting asset information

•   The ITAssetManagement.in software scope will include

• ALL Hardware and Software assets managed by IT
• ALL countries managed by IT

Asset Management Reporting – Phase 1 (Information Collection) (Send these to your local team)

• The first step in establishing the baseline information is for representatives from each region to coordinate the completion of a standard questionnaire for each of the countries in their region
• Upon completion of this questionnaire a series of individual and team meetings will be scheduled to confirm the questionnaire responses and refine the information when necessary

•   The following slides will provide information to assist in completing the questionnaire

• Further clarification of specific questions
• For some questions there will be specific list of potential answers

•   Guidelines for completing the questionnaire

• Ensure that a response has been provided to ALL questions
• A separate questionnaire should be completed for each country region
• If there are any concerns or questions that arise during the completion of the questionnaire please make sure to copy the entire team as it may be useful to them

Question related to Hardware

For questions on the Software tab provide a response for each software asset category separately.  The following is a list of the types of software included in each of the asset vendor categories.   This should be used as reference and is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of the software

Phase 2 – Finding right tool

Every local office has their own way to manage assets like excel sheet, local software. Find the right tools are not easy, remembers new tool must have following option:

1. User friendly
2. Customizable
3. Web-based
4. Database integration
5. Cost Effective

Here is the some comparison of various tools which include open source and paid

We would personally recommend IT Asset management.in tool however there are couple free tools that you can use from here : Click here

Phase 3:

Analyze the information you collected and prepare the data import plan either with help of vendor or with your team In case if you need more details about process and excel sheet format in which you can ask your team to provide details. Please send us email at contact@itassetmanagement.in or stay tuned for the next blog.

The post How to manage assets for large organizations appeared first on IT Asset Management Software.

System Admin tools to cut cost and organize your department starting from erp to #itassetmanagement.in

A curated list of amazingly awesome open source sysadmin resources inspired by Awesome PHP

• • Cloning
  • Cloud Computing
  • Cloud Storage
  • Code Review
  • Collaborative Software
  • Configuration Management Database
  • Configuration Management
  • Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment
  • Distributed Filesystems
  • DNS
  • Hosting Control Panels
  • IMAP/POP3
  • IT Asset Management
  • LDAP
  • Log Management
  • Monitoring
  • Metric & Metric Collection
  • Network Configuration Management
  • Newsletter
  • NoSQL
  • Packaging
  • Queuing
  • RDBMS
  • Security
  • Service Discovery
  • SMTP
  • Software Containers
  • SSH
  • Statistics
  • Ticketing systems
  • Troubleshooting
  • Project Management
  • Version control
  • Virtualization
  • VPN
  • XMPP
  • Web
  • Webmails
  • Wikis
• Resources
  • Blogs
  • Books
  • Editors
  • Newsletters
  • Repositories
  • Websites
• Contributing

Backups

Backup software.

• Amanda – Client-server model backup tool.
• Bacula – Another Client-server model backup tool.
• Backupninja – Lightweight, extensible meta-backup system.
• Backuppc – Client-server model backup tool with file pooling scheme.
• Bup – Incremental backups with rolling checksums, git packfiles, de-duplication, and a FUSE filesystem.
• Burp – Network backup and restore program.
• Duplicity – Encrypted bandwidth-efficient backup using the rsync algorithm.
• FreeFileSync – Folder comparison and synchronization tool.
• Lsyncd – Watches a local directory trees for changes, and then spawns a process to synchronize the changes. Uses rsync by default.
• Rsnapshot – Filesystem Snapshotting Utility.
• SafeKeep – Centralized pull-based backup using rdiff-backup.
• TarSnap – Secure backup service with an open-source client.
• UrBackup – Another client-server backup system.

Backup libraries.

• Backup – Provides an elegant DSL in Ruby for performing backups on UNIX-like systems.
• DREBS – AWS EBS backup script that supports strategies.

Cloning

Cloning software.

• Clonezilla – Partition and disk imaging/cloning program.
• Fog – Another computer cloning solution.
• Redo Backup – Easy Backup, Recovery and Restore.

Cloud Computing

• AppScale – Open source cloud software with Google App Engine compatibility.
• Archipel – Manage and supervise virtual machines using Libvirt.
• CloudStack – Cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services.
• Cobbler – Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments.
• Eucalyptus – Open source private cloud software with AWS compatibility.
• Mesos – Develop and run resource-efficient distributed systems.
• OpenNebula – An user-driven cloud management platform for sysadmins and devops.
• OpenStack – Open source software for building private and public clouds.
• The Foreman – Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. FOSS.

Cloud Orchestration

• BOSH – IaaS orchestration platform originally written for deploying and managing Cloud Foundry PaaS, but also useful for general purpose distributed systems.
• Cloudify – Open source TOSCA-based cloud orchestration software platform written in Python and YAML.
• Juju – Cloud orechestration tool which manages services as charms, YAML configuration and deployment script bundles.
• MCollective – Ruby framework to manage server orchestration, developed by Puppet labs.
• Overcast – Deploy VMs across different cloud providers, and run commands and scripts across any or all of them in parallel via SSH.
• Rundeck – Simple orchestration tool.
• Salt – It’s written in Python.
• serf – Serf is a tool for cluster membership
• consul – It is a tool for discovering and configuring services in your infrastructure.
• zookeeper – ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.
• etcd – A highly-available key value store for shared configuration and service discovery
• doozerd – Doozer is a highly-available, completely consistent store for small amounts of extremely important data.

Cloud Storage

• git-annex assistant – A synchronized folder on each of your OSX and Linux computers, Android devices, removable drives, NAS appliances, and cloud services.
• ownCloud – Provides universal access to your files via the web, your computer or your mobile devices.
• Seafile – Another Open Source Cloud Storage solution.
• SparkleShare – Provides cloud storage and file synchronization services. By default, it uses Git as a storage back-end.
• Swift – A highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store.
• Syncthing – Open Source system for private, encrypted and authenticated distribution of data.

Code Review

Web Based collaborative code review system.

• Gerrit – Based on the Git version control, it facilitates software developers to review modifications to the source code and approve or reject those changes.
• Review Board – Available as free software under the MIT License.

Collaborative Software

Collaborative software or groupware suites.

• Citadel/UX – Collaboration suite (messaging and groupware) that is descended from the Citadel family of programs.
• EGroupware – Groupware software written in PHP.
• Horde Groupware – PHP based collaborative software suite that includes email, calendars, wikis, time tracking and file management.
• Kolab – Another groupware suite.
• SOGo – Collaborative software server with a focus on simplicity and scale-ability.
• Zimbra – Collaborative software suite, that includes an email server and web client.

Configuration Management Database

Configuration management database (CMDB) software.

• i-doit – Open Source IT Documentation and CMDB.
• iTop – A complete open source, ITIL, web based service management tool.
• Ralph – Asset management, DCIM and CMDB system for large Data Centers as well as smaller LAN networks.
• Clusto – Helps you keep track of your inventory, where it is, how it’s connected, and provides an abstracted interface for interacting with the elements of the infrastructure.

Configuration Management

Configuration management tools.

• Ansible – It’s written in Python and manages the nodes over SSH.
• CFEngine – Lightweight agent system. Configuration state is specified via a declarative language.
• Chef – It’s written in Ruby and Erlang and uses a pure-Ruby DSL.
• Fabric – Python library and cli tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.
• Pallet – Infrastructure definition, configuration and management via a Clojure DSL.
• Puppet – It’s written in Ruby and uses Puppet’s declarative language or a Ruby DSL.
• Salt – It’s written in Python.
• Slaughter – It’s written in Perl.

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment

Continuous integration/deployment software.

• Buildbot – Python-based toolkit for continuous integration.
• Drone – Continuous integration server built on Docker and configured using YAML files.
• GitLab CI – Based off of ruby. They also provide GitLab, which manages git repositories.
• Go – Open source continuous delivery server.
• Jenkins – An extendable open source continuous integration server.
• Vlad the Deployer – Deployment automation.

Distributed File-systems

Network distributed file systems.

• Ceph – Distributed object store and file system.
• DRBD – Distributed Replicated Block Device.
• LeoFS – Unstructured object/data storage and a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent storage system.
• GlusterFS – Scale-out network-attached storage file system.
• HDFS – Distributed, scale-able, and portable file-system written in Java for the Hadoop framework.
• Lustre – A type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing.
• MooseFS – Fault tolerant, network distributed file system.
• MogileFS – Application level, network distributed file system.
• OpenAFS – Distributed network file system with read-only replicas and multi-OS support.
• TahoeLAFS – secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, peer-to-peer distributed data store and distributed file system.
• XtreemFS – XtreemFS is a fault-tolerant distributed file system for all storage needs.

DNS

DNS servers.

• Bind – The most widely used name server software.
• djbdns – A collection of DNS applications, including tinydns.
• Designate – DNS REST API that support several DNS servers as its backend.
• dnsmasq – A lightweight service providing DNS, DHCP and TFTP services to small-scale networks.
• Knot – High performance authoritative-only DNS server.
• NSD – Authoritative only, high performance, simple name server.
• PowerDNS – DNS server with a variety of data storage back-ends and load balancing features.
• Unbound – Validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver.
• Yadifa – Lightweight authoritative Name Server with DNSSEC capabilities powering the .eu top-level domain.

Hosting Control Panels

Web hosting control panels

• Ajenti – Control panel for Linux and BSD.
• Feathur – VPS Provisioning and Management Software.
• ISPConfig – Hosting control panel for Linux.
• VestaCP – Hosting panel for Linux but with Nginx.
• Virtualmin – Control panel for Linux based on webmin.
• ZPanel – Control panel for Linux, BSD, and Windows.

IMAP/POP3

IMAP/POP3 mail servers.

• Courier IMAP/POP3 – Fast, scalable, enterprise IMAP and POP3 server.
• Cyrus IMAP/POP3 – Intended to be run on sealed servers, where normal users are not permitted to log in.
• Dovecot – IMAP and POP3 server written primarily with security in mind.
• Qpopper – One of the oldest and most popular server implementations of POP3.

IT Asset Management

IT Assets Management software.

• IT Asset management (#itassetmanagement.in) – Asset & license management software with barcode print option.
• GLPI – Information Resource-Manager with an additional Administration Interface.
• OCS Inventory NG – Enables users to inventory their IT assets.
• RackTables – Datacenter and server room asset management like document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, networks configuration.
• Ralph – Asset management, DCIM and CMDB system for large Data Centers as well as smaller LAN networks.

LDAP

LDAP servers.

• 389 Directory Server – Developed by Red Hat.
• Apache Directory Server – Apache Software Foundation project written in Java.
• Fusion Directory – Improve the Management of the services and the company directory based on OpenLDAP.
• OpenDJ – Fork of OpenDS.
• OpenDS – Another directory server written in Java.
• OpenLDAP – Developed by the OpenLDAP Project.

LDAP management

• Apache Directory Studio – The Eclipse-based LDAP browser and directory client

Log Management

Log management tools: collect, parse, visualize …

• Elasticsearch – A Lucene Based Document store mainly used for log indexing, storage and analysis.
• Fluentd – Log Collector and Shipper.
• Flume – Distributed log collection and aggregation system.
• Graylog2 – Plugged Log and Event Analysis Server with Alerting options.
• Heka – Stream processing system which may be used for log aggregation.
• Kibana – Visualize logs and time-stamped data.
• Logstash – Tool for managing events and logs.
• Octopussy – Log Management Solution (Visualize / Alert / Report).

Monitoring

Monitoring software.

• Cacti – Web-based network monitoring and graphing tool.
• Cabot – Monitoring and alerts, similar to PagerDuty.
• Centreon – IT infrastructure and application monitoring for service performance.
• check_mk – Collection of extensions for Nagios.
• Dash – A low-overhead monitoring web dashboard for a GNU/Linux machine.
• Icinga – Fork of Nagios.
• LibreNMS – fork of Observium.
• Monit – Small Open Source utility for managing and monitoring Unix systems.
• Munin – Networked resource monitoring tool.
• Naemon – Network monitoring tool based on the Nagios 4 core with performance enhancements and new features.
• Nagios – Computer system, network and infrastructure monitoring software application.
• Observium – SNMP monitoring for servers and networking devices. Runs on linux.
• OMD – The Open Monitoring Distribution.
• Opsview – Based on Nagios 4, Opsview Core is ideal for small IT and test environments.
• Riemann – Flexible and fast events processor allowing complex events/metrics analysis.
• Sensu – Open source monitoring framework.
• Sentry – Application monitoring, event logging and aggregation.
• Shinken – Another monitoring framework.
• Thruk – Multibackend monitoring web interface with support for Naemon, Nagios, Icinga and Shinken.
• Xymon – Network monitoring inspired by Big Brother.
• Zabbix – Enterprise-class software for monitoring of networks and applications.
• Zenoss – Application, server, and network management platform based on Zope.

Metric & Metric Collection

Metric gathering and display software.

• Collectd – System statistic collection daemon.
• Collectl – High precision system performance metrics collecting tool.
• Dashing – Ruby gem that allows for rapid statistical dashboard development. An all HTML5 approach allows for big screen displays in data centers or conference rooms.
• Diamond – Python based statistic collection daemon.
• Ganglia – High performance, scalable RRD based monitoring for grids and/or clusters of servers. Compatible with Graphite using a single collection process.
• Grafana – A Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor.
• Graphite – Open source scaleable graphing server.
• InfluxDB – Open source distributed time series database with no external dependencies.
• KairosDB – Fast distributed scalable time series database, fork of OpenTSDB 1.x.
• OpenTSDB – Store and server massive amounts of time series data without losing granularity.
• RRDtool – Open source industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data.
• Statsd – Application statistic listener.

Network Configuration Management

Network configuration management tools.

• GestióIP – An automated web based IPv4/IPv6 IP Address Management tool.
• RANCID – Monitors network device’s configuration and maintain history of changes.
• rConfig – Another network device configuration management tool.

Newsletters

Newsletter software.

• DadaMail – Mailing List Manager, written in Perl.
• phpList – Newsletter manager written in PHP.

NoSQL

NoSQL databases.

• Column-Family
  • Apache HBase – Hadoop database, a distributed, big data store.
  • Cassandra – Distributed DBMS designed to handle large amounts of data across many servers.
  • Hypertable – C++ based BigTable-like DBMS, communicates through Thrift and runs either as stand-alone or on distributed FS such as Hadoop.
• Document Store
  • CouchDB – Ease of use, with multi-master replication document-oriented database system.
  • ElasticSearch – Java based database, popular with log aggregation, and email archiving projects.
  • MongoDB – Another document-oriented database system.
  • RavenDB – Document based database with ACID/Transnational features.
  • RethinkDB – Open source distributed document store database, focuses on JSON.
• Graph
  • FlockDB – Twitter’s distributed, fault-tolerant graph database.
  • Neo4j – Open source graph database.
• Key-Value
  • LevelDB – Google’s high performance key/value database.
  • Redis – Networked, in-memory, key-value data store with optional durability.
  • Riak – Another fault-tolerant key-value NoSQL database.

Comparison of NoSQL servers: http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

Packaging

• fpm – Versatile multi format package creator.
• omnibus-ruby – Full stack, cross distro packaging software (Ruby).
• packman – Full stack, cross distro packaging software (Python).
• tito – Builds RPMs for git-based projects.

Queuing

Queuing software

• ActiveMQ – An open source message broker written in Java together with a full JMS client.
• BeanstalkD – A simple, fast work queue.
• Gearman – Fast multi-language queuing/job processing platform.
• Kafka – A high-throughput distributed messaging system.
• NSQ – A realtime distributed messaging platform.
• RabbitMQ – Robust, fully featured, cross distro queuing system.

Queuing libraries

• ZeroMQ – High-performance asynchronous messaging library.

RDBMS

Relational DBMS.

• Firebird – True universal open source database.
• Galera – Galera Cluster for MySQL is an easy-to-use high-availability solution with high system up-time, no data loss, and scalability for future growth.
• MariaDB – Community-developed fork of the MySQL.
• MySQL – Most popular RDBMS server.
• Percona Server – Enhanced, drop-in MySQL replacement.
• PostgreSQL – Object-relational database management system (ORDBMS).
• PostgreSQL-XL – Scalable Open Source PostgreSQL-based database cluster.
• SQLite – Library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL DBS.

Security

Security tools.

• Denyhosts – Thwart SSH dictionary based attacks and brute force attacks.
• Fail2Ban – Scans log files and takes action on IPs that show malicious behavior.
• SpamAssassin – A powerful and popular email spam filter employing a variety of detection techniques.

Service Discovery

• Consul – Consul is a tool for service discovery, monitoring and configuration.
• Doozerd – Doozer is a highly-available, completely consistent store for small amounts of extremely important data.
• ZooKeeper – ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.

SMTP

SMTP servers.

• Exim – Message transfer agent (MTA) developed at the University of Cambridge.
• Haraka – A high-performance, pluginable SMTP server written in JavaScript.
• MailCatcher – Ruby gem that deploys a simply SMTP MTA gateway that accepts all mail and displays in web interface. Useful for debugging or development.
• Maildrop – Open Source disposable email SMTP server, also useful for development.
• OpenSMTPD – Secure SMTP server implementation from the OpenBSD project.
• Postfix – Fast, easy to administer, and secure Sendmail replacement.
• Qmail – Secure Sendmail replacement.
• Sendmail – Message transfer agent (MTA).

Software Containers

Operating system–level virtualization.

• Bitnami – Produces open source installers or software packages for web applications and development stacks as well as virtual appliances.
• Docker – Open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications.
• OpenVZ – Container-based virtualization for Linux.

SSH

SSH tools.

• autossh – Automatically respawn ssh session after network interruption.
• Cluster SSH – Controls a number of xterm windows via a single graphical console.
• DSH – Dancer’s shell / distributed shell – Wrapper for executing multiple remote shell commands from one command line.
• Mosh – The mobile shell.
• parallel-ssh – Provides parallel versions of OpenSSH and related tools.
• SSH Power Tool – Execute commands and upload files to many servers simultaneously without using pre-shared keys.

Statistics

Analytics software.

• Analog – The most popular logfile analyser in the world.
• GoAccess – Open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal.
• Piwik – Free and open source web analytics application.
• Webalizer – Fast, free web server log file analysis program.

Ticketing systems

Web-based ticketing system.

• Bugzilla – General-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project.
• Cerb – A group-based e-mail management project built with a commercial open source license.
• Flyspray – Web-based bug tracking system written in PHP.
• MantisBT – Another web-based bug tracking system.
• osTicket – Open source support ticket system.
• Otrs – A free and open-source trouble ticket system software package that a company, organization, or other entity can use to assign tickets to incoming queries and track further communications about them.
• Request Tracker – Ticket-tracking system written in Perl.
• TheBugGenie – Open source ticket system with extremely complete users rights granularity.

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Tools.

• mitmproxy – A Python tool used for intercepting, viewing and modifying network traffic. Invaluable in troubleshooting certain problems.
• Sysdig – Capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze.
• Wireshark – The world’s foremost network protocol analyzer.

Project Management

Web-based project management and bug tracking systems.

• ChiliProject – Fork of Redmine.
• GitBucket Clone of GitHub written in Scala; single jar install.
• GitLab – Clone of GitHub written in Ruby.
• Gogs – Written in Go.
• OpenProject – Project collaboration with open source.
• Phabricator Written in PHP.
• Redmine – Written in ruby on rails.
• The Bug Genie – Written in PHP.
• Trac – Written in python.

Version control

Software versioning and revision control.

• Fossil – Distributed version control with built-in wiki and bug tracking.
• Git – Distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) with an emphasis on speed.
• GNU Bazaar – Distributed revision control system sponsored by Canonical.
• Mercurial – Another distributed revision control.
• Subversion – Client-server revision control system.

Virtualization

Virtualization software.

• Ganeti – Cluster virtual server management software tool built on top of KVM and Xen.
• KVM – Linux kernel virtualization infrastructure.
• oVirt – Manages virtual machines, storage and virtual networks.
• Packer – A tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
• Vagrant – Tool for building complete development environments.
• VirtualBox – Virtualization product from Oracle Corporation.
• Xen – Virtual machine monitor for 32/64 bit Intel / AMD (IA 64) and PowerPC 970 architectures.

VPN

VPN software.

• OpenVPN – Uses a custom security protocol that utilizes SSL/TLS for key exchange.
• Pritunl – OpenVPN based solution. Easy to set up.
• SoftEther – Multi-protocol software VPN with advanced features
• sshuttle – Poor man’s VPN.
• strongSwan – Complete IPsec implementation for Linux.
• tinc – Distributed p2p VPN.

XMPP

XMPP servers.

• ejabberd – XMPP instant messaging server written in Erlang/OTP.
• Metronome IM – Fork of Prosody IM.
• MongooseIM – Fork of ejabberd.
• Openfire – Real time collaboration (RTC) server.
• Prosody IM – XMPP server written in Lua.
• Tigase – XMPP server implementation in Java.

Webmails

Webmail applications.

• Mailpile – A modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features.
• Roundcube – Browser-based IMAP client with an application-like user interface.

Web

Web servers.

• Apache – Most popular web server.
• Cherokee – Lightweight, high-performance web server/reverse proxy.
• Lighttpd – Web server more optimized for speed-critical environments.
• Nginx – Reverse proxy, load balancer, HTTP cache, and web server.
• uWSGI – The uWSGI project aims at developing a full stack for building hosting services.

Web Performance

• HAProxy – Software based load Balancing, SSL offloading and performance optimization, compression, and general web routing.
• Varnish – HTTP based web application accelerator focusing on optimizing caching and compression.

Wikis

Wiki software.

• DokuWiki – Simple to use and highly versatile wiki that doesn’t require a database.
• Gollum – A simple, Git-powered wiki with a sweet API and local frontend.
• ikiwiki – A wiki compiler.
• Mediawiki – Used to power Wikipedia.
• MoinMoin – An advanced, easy to use and extensible WikiEngine with a large community of users.
  • Ōlelo Wiki – A a wiki that stores pages in a Git repository.
• TiddlyWiki – Complete interactive wiki in JavaScript.

Resources

Various resources, such as books, websites and articles, for improving your skills and knowledge.

Blogs

• Code as Craft – Etsy’s Ops blog, lots of technical posts.
• DevOpsGuys – Devops consultants who blog about operations.
• Rackspace Developers – Slightly biased blog with lots of Devops Topics.

Books

Sysadmin related books.

• The Linux Command Line – A book about the Linux command line by William Shotts.
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win – How DevOps techniques can fix the problems that happen in IT organizations.
• The Practice of System and Network Administration – The first and second editions describes the best practices of system and network administration, independent of specific platforms or technologies.
• The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps – Is a methodology designed to jumpstart implementation of controls and process improvement.
• UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook – Approaches system administration from a practical perspective.

Editors

Open source code editors.

• Atom – A hackable text editor from Github.
• Brackets – Open source code editor for web designers and front-end developers.
• Eclipse – IDE written in Java with an extensible plug-in system.
• Geany – GTK2 text editor.
• GNU Emacs – An extensible, customizable text editor-and more.
• Haroopad – Markdown editor with live preview.
• ICEcoder – Code editor awesomeness, built with common web languages.
• jotgit – Git-backed real-time collaborative code editing.
• Light Table – The next generation code editor.
• Lime – Aims to provide an open source solution to Sublime Text
• TextMate – A graphical text editor for OS X.
• Vim – A highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient editing.

Newsletters

• Servers for Hackers – Newsletter for programmers who find themselves needing to know their way around a server.

Repositories

Software package repositories.

• Dotdeb – Repository with LAMP updated packages for Debian.
• Remi – Repository with LAMP updated packages for RHEL/Centos/Fedora.

Websites

Useful sysadmin related websites.

• Ops School – Comprehensive program that will help you learn to be an operations engineer.
• Digital Ocean Tutorials – A surprisingly vast resource for getting the basics of certain applications, tools, or even systems administration topics.

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