You don't have to sign up for a follow-up sales call or register for an account on their website to access the trial, which is always a very welcome touch and eliminates one of the main barriers that prevents folks from giving products like this a shot.Īfter a quick installation process, you're asked to provide some simple details about your network, including the number of computers (or nodes) that you have, whether you're interested in looking for non-Windows nodes (including SNMP devices and Macintosh computers), and whether you want the scanning method to be Fast or Accurate, as Figure 1 shows.
Where these products differentiate themselves is in the inventory details that they capture and the reporting that they produce, which were my primary areas of interest when reviewing ClearApps Network Inventory Advisor.ĬlearApps offers a 15-day, fully-featured downloadable trial version of their product. On the surface, they all do the same basic thing: they scan your network, attempt to connect to any computers and devices they find, and pull down inventory details from anything they were successfully able to connect to. If you're in the market for a software tool to collect these inventory details for you, you'll find that there's a plethora of software products available.
Network inventory advisor software upgrade#
This arduous task is often born out of necessity: an audit is being conducted or a software upgrade is planned, and you need to know, for example, whether the computers on your network are ready to support the upgrade without requiring additional RAM. Every IT professional needs to know what's going on in the networks that they manage, and an important part of that is having a detailed inventory of the computers and devices that are connected.