For Round 2 in this series of blogs, I thought I'd talk about the System Change service and how it can add value to your IT service offerings.
As many of you know, N-central is a great asset management tool - it gathers *tons* of information about the devices it's managing.
Keeping 'asset management' in mind, what are some of the questions that your customers sometimes ask you related to their assets?
(and no, 'How about I give you more money to monitor my assets?' is not the question I’m thinking about)
What about this one: 'We have a highly secure environment, and need to know whenever there is a hardware change – is that something you can do?'
Or, it could be a little more pointed and along the lines of 'We suspect that one of our employees may be stealing hardware from us – is there any way you can help us keep track of what we have and what may be missing?’
If these are questions you've been asked before or concerns you think your clients may have, then the System Change service is a feature of N-central 7.0 that you'll definitely want to know about!
The System Change service will alert you whenever something hardware-related changes on the machine. For example, if that unscrupulous employee 'borrows' 2GB of RAM from his workstation, or replaces his high-end video card with a low end model, the System Change service will send you a handy notification that you can then share with your client and look like a hero.
There are 7 types of hardware that the System Change service monitors:
· Network Cards
· CPUs
· Physical Drives
· Video Cards
· RAM
· Motherboards
· Operating System (which isn't really hardware-related, but it's part of the service anyways so let’s just roll with it!)
Now, what about if that hardware change is intentional and you don’t want it flagged every time an assessment is run (for example, your technician installs some RAM)? No problem!
N-central keeps a 'baseline' of the device's hardware. To approve of this new hardware change all you have to do is go to the System Change tab of the device, and click the 'Use current information as the new baseline' check box. That’s it. The hardware change has been noted and all is good.
Well, that's all for now - in my next blog, I'll talk about how you can monitor applications and license usage - so stay tuned!
Any questions on the above, please email me at creid@n-able.com.
Cheers,
Chris