GLPI in a small organization, part 2. Basic functionality and features of its use

In the first part of an article on GLPI, written back in October 2016, I talked about the typical deployment of this system, typical of a small organization, and pointed out some features of installing related products and a kind of best practice that I personally use.

In the second part on GLPI, I plan to highlight the most used functionality of this system and tell readers about the intricacies of working with it. I ask everyone who is interested, welcome under cat.

1. GLPI as a computer equipment management system

It's no secret that in small and medium-sized organizations, the system administrator often performs several roles: technical support, system administration, design of information systems, maintaining the equipment and software fleet in a usable condition.

GLPI allows you to enter data on the equipment used and store it statically, until the next time the administrator makes changes. However, it’s more convenient to work with GLPI using some plugins , for example, Fusion Inventory. You can read the documentation and download the latest versions of the Fusion Inventory agent on the official website .

Fusion Inventory is an excellent plugin for collecting and updating information about the PC and software fleet. To obtain information, agents are used that are written for all popular OSs, and, in fact, the Fusion Inventory plugin for GLPI itself.

Developers offer many ways to install agents on Windows , including use GPP and VBS script, more details here .

Personally, I prefer the installation method through Windows Group Policy using a VBS script.

A group policy has been created for computers included in a particular group, say "Computers_for_GLPI", where a script for VBS has been added as a start script .

You can consider all available scripts and choose the option suitable for your infrastructure.

After installing the agents and starting their work, information about the hardware and software begins to flow to the GLPI server.

All information on hardware and software falls into the “Hardware” section, but some reports and additional options are available through the “Add-ons” section, the “Fusion Inventory” item.

A system administrator with a real system approach to work can receive data on the equipment and software used, including filter by CPU architecture, type of memory used, operating system, and much more.

As a result, he will be able to modernize or replace obsolete hardware and software, which ultimately should increase labor productivity and information security of the system as a whole.

2. GLPI as an information technology management system

GLPI, as I mentioned in the first article , has long been a powerful combine that can make life easier for a system administrator, TP specialist, or head of IT department.

Consider some plugins and built-in functionality that will help in the activities of the IT department.

The IT department management functionality is located in the "Management" and "Tools" sections.
Revealing the full power of this functionality is impossible without using the system described in the first paragraph of this article. So, what can we control:

• With software licenses, the list of which will be loaded by Fusion Inventory agents, you just have to add the terms, users (which can be quickly taken from AD), versions and other information. It is possible to systematize disparate licenses of an enterprise for software and always have on hand current license agreements and the number of licenses. Awareness of IT department specialists about the number and type of licenses will eliminate or critically reduce user downtime due to shortages or expiration of software licenses.
• With contacts, everything is quite simple here: we introduce and systematize information on external and some internal contacts. In my humble opinion, at least 2 contacts should be entered for each external service. Such is the high availability =)
• By service providers, here you can add previously made contacts, add information on general communications, attach documents and contracts.
• By contracts, here you can accumulate on current, past and future contracts, which will allow you to extend or terminate contacts in time.

GLPI includes a notification system that will warn you in advance of expiring contracts.

In general, members of the trio of Suppliers, Contracts, Contacts should be inseparable, regardless of the way documentation is maintained. This allows, in case of questions, to follow the chain: service - contract - contacts, which speeds up the solution of the problem.

In the "Tools" section, from my point of view, the items "Knowledge Base" and "Reservation" are important.

Redundancy: it is possible and quite convenient to reserve equipment used only inside the IT department through this functionality. Test laptop, server, switch - please. We added equipment, indicated the reservation dates, and forward to new victories!

Microsoft has a well-known Exchange Server product in today's corporate environment. In my opinion, for backing up equipment and premises, its functionality is much more convenient and easy to use. If you have an Exchange Server, have shared equipment and premises, and you don’t use the functionality of equipment boxes and room boxes - look in its direction, perhaps this will help to avoid usage conflicts and increase productivity by eliminating the time to call the secretary to search for free meeting room or in disputes with a competitor on a corporate laptop for presentation at the exhibition. See here for more details: equipment drawer and room drawer

The Knowledge Base is much less convenient than the classic wiki system, but its presence eliminates the need to accompany another system if there is not much information for the Knowledge Base. Here you can manage the visibility areas of articles, which will allow you to publish step-by-step instructions for users, and hide from them information about the intricacies of the settings of switches in remote branches, for example.

3. GLPI as a technical support system (TP) of users

I happened to use GLPI as a TP system in several organizations.
For a small organization, the use of GLPI as a combine harvester to help the IT department is justified, and as a result of such use, a TP system on GLPI arises.

Most of the TP functionality is located in the “Support” section.
For the TP system to function properly, you will need to configure and start using another part of the GLPI functionality:

• You need to configure User Authentication. To do this, we create a user in Active Directory or another LDAP that can receive information about users; for this, “Read Only” rights to containers with GLPI users are sufficient.
  
  Add a new LDAP directory, specify the username and password for the user.
  
  More details here .
• You need to configure the mail receiver so that the scheduler can connect to the mail system box and pick up letters intended for TP from there.
  Its setting is located in "Settings" - "Receivers".
  The setup is not difficult: we indicate the type of connection to the mail server, its address, connection box and some security settings.
  For Exchange Server, the resulting output string is usually: {exch_server / imap / novalidate-cert / tls} INBOX
• You need to configure user notifications. This is done in the “Settings” - “Notifications” section. Here you can configure notification templates, the sending server and the type of notifications and their mandatory nature when dealing with the application. More details in the GLPI documentation (French is possible)
• An important tool for automating applications is the Business Rules for Applications. In the documentation, information about business rules appeared in French, remembering the school course, I mastered the general information, link . In general, to redefine part of applications, for example, containing the keyword “mail” immediately to the Exchange administrator, the logic of business rules is quite simple to understand and use. In addition, it is possible to change the priority of the application, which allows you to process applications from key specialists of the company faster, which ultimately saves them time.

The most common rules in my practice is to redefine applications for groups of specialists by keywords, for example, “1C”, “mail”, “jira”, “project”. Thus, applications immediately get to the right specialist, bypassing the specialist involved in the initial processing of applications, redefining the importance and priority of applications from company managers and key specialists, reducing the priority of applications from some departments to medium, increasing priority to high, etc.

Thus, the GLPI-based TP system has the full functionality of other paid and free TP systems: various application filing methods (mail, web interface), business rules for applications, the ability to track and comment on applications via mail and the web, ranking and processing by impact , urgency and priority, the ability to create subtasks for applications, attachment of equipment and specialists to applications, the ability to monitor.

The opportunities for sorting and ranking tasks are fully accessible to both TP specialists and administrators, thanks to a wide range of filters when working in the "Support" - "Applications" section.

In addition, for the TP web interface, you can edit the application template by overriding the required parameters, which will ensure that users indicate the direction of the call (mail, 1C, remote access, etc.), urgency, influence.

Conclusion : I talked about the basic functionality that I use in those very “typical” organizations of small and medium size (up to 400 users).

It is the broad capabilities of GLPI and its openness that made this system quite popular, which in the future should bear fruit in the form of good documentation, a developed community and an increase in the number of talented developers who can expand and hone GLPI functionality.

In addition to the functionality described above, a good set of plug-ins and the ability to customize the appearance of many elements, including notification messages, login pages, reports, etc.

In the third part of the planned series of articles on GLPI, I want to consider the functionality and use of the most common plug-ins and my vision of their use, as well as some nuances of fine-tuning some of the GLPI functions.