Software spotlight: A look at Snipe-IT’s asset management style

Some IT pros charged with tracking their company’s laptops, software licenses, monitors, and printer ink may turn to a familiar tool on the desktop: a giant spreadsheet. But the ever-expanding rows and columns have their way of spreading tech pros thin.

IT asset management (ITAM) tools have emerged to help practitioners inventory their tech and the employees associated with them.

Tim Zimmerman, VP at market intelligence firm Gartner, sees the products helping companies answer important business questions like:

• How many devices do I have under warranty?
• Who has devices that are at the end of their life-cycle?
• How many devices have been sent for servicing help?
• How many devices have been off the network for a long period of time?

While vendors offer paid ITAM services, some IT pros have been happy to find a free option: Snipe-IT. In addition to Snipe-IT’s free option, the company also offers paid tiers for extra features, like hosting, support, and regular back-up services.

This week Osei Owusu, sales and support engineer for Grokability, the company behind Snipe-IT, took us through capabilities in the self-hosting option.

Owusu highlights three sections of the Snipe-IT dashboard.

People: The tool integrates with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), a protocol used by Microsoft Active Directory (AD), meaning that employees registered in AD sync to the platform and appear as dropdown options when assigning people to assets. The platform also integrates with SCIM, a standard for exchanging identity information between systems.

Assets: A laptop, for example, can be assigned a “checkout” date (useful for temporary employees, Owusu noted), and users and admins can be alerted to approaching dates. Checkouts are also applied to assets within assets—someone can note that a laptop, let’s say, has been given an expensive video card or a customized storage amount.

The asset can be assigned to locations as well (a classroom or conference room, for example). The tab here provides a history of the device, along with status labels like “deployed,” “ready to deploy,” and “archived,” referring to a lost or stolen device.

The assets section also allows IT pros to include purchase date, cost, and warranty, to assist in calculating the depreciation of a given device. Admins can require users to “confirm acceptance” of an asset through signature, if needed.

Licenses: This section can help practitioners keep track of license quantity and the product key associated with those licenses (and assign them to employees).

Assets can be added manually, Owusu said, or imported via a .csv file that adheres to a template of data categories.

Find a laptop in the hallway? The Snipe-IT tools lets admins create labels. The asset’s QR code, scannable by phone, leads to asset info.

While Gartner’s Zimmerman didn’t comment on Snipe-IT’s specific capabilities, he noted the importance of asset managers’ ability to integrate with other IT tools like help-desk systems and procurement platforms.

Snipe-IT does not integrate with help-desk systems “out of the box,” Owusu said, but developers can use API keys and test codes that connect the asset manager with other relevant tools.

The open-source tool-maker released its “v8” update, with features like custom note options for assets and “breadcrumbs” in the interface to allow users to easily toggle back to previous windows.

Owusu said the tool is one of the few at its price point that does a good job keeping track of assets and users.

“And that’s pretty much any IT technician’s worst nightmare: Where are my assets? Or, when do I need to order additional equipment?”