TAGS: Common usage?

Question

Hello,

I'm a new user of OCS Inventory.

What is exactly the prupose of tags?
I think it's to better organize our inventory.

If so... can I add multiple tags on the same server? How? I've tried to add it but it's always seen as a single tag, even if separated by space, comma...

Thanks!

Simon

Answer 1

Hi Simon,

I think that there are several possibilities but globally the "tag" allows to provide a personalized label ("étiquette" in french) to the inventoried machine.

> It is an easy way to categorize PCs in order to find them more easily in your OCS database, to add them in a group (customer, service, use, etc.), allow selection of a exclusive PCs category (lock) or to carry out a common action on several PCs .

Of course, the value of this tag depends directly on the inventoried machine and there can be as many values as the organization of your customers requires in a same OCS database server.

The TAG * element (4th option) in the "Configuration" area of the OCS server allows you to customize the text that will be automatically requested during the first inventory of the new inventoried machine.

* (I can not remember how it was called in English, I translated the whole interface into French)

Regards, Stéphane

Answer 2

Hello,

Thanks for the clarification.

It's then possible to add multiple tags for the same server? THe server could be tagged as "customer" and the same time as "linux" or as "city-name".

So I could group all linux servers or all server in a given location by tags, but cannot figure out how to do that.

Thanks,

Simon

Answer 3

Simon,

We have to talk about the same thing...

There is the OCS Inventory server (Linux or Windows), and there are the "clients" in which is installed an agent that transfers its machine inventory to the OCS server.

Whether your OCS agents are installed on a server / workstation on Windows or Linux or Mac does not change much ... They all behave like clients that send their inventory to the OCS server.

This custom tag is there to differentiate (or not) the origin of your clients.

Sorry if I did not understand your request ...

Stéphane

Answer 4

Hello Stéphane,

I am sorry if I'm not using the right way to explain myself ;-)

First of all, I've OCS Inventory Server on Linux box (with all components) and yes, the rest are all OCS clients/agents, even if most of them are used a servers (here my mistrake in the explanation) but not OCS servers. So, let me give you an example:

• OCS Inventory Server 2.3.1

The we have agents, like those:

• Linux Agent: WEB Server located in DATACENTER1, managed by customer
• Linux Agent: DB Server located in DATACENTER1, managed by customer
• Windows Agent: WEB Server located in DATACENTER1, managed by ISP
• Windows Agent: Windows workstation, located in OFFICE1, managed by ISP
• Windows Agent: DB Server located in DATACENTER2, managed by ISP

I would like to group them with TAGS. The result of the above setup could be:

• Linux Agent: TAGS: linux, server, datacenter1, customer
• Linux Agent: TAGS: linux, server, datacenter1, customer
• Windows Agent: TAGS: windows, server, datacenter1, intern
• Windows Agent: TAGS: windows, workstation, office1, intern
• Windows Agent: TAGS: windows, server, datacenter2, intern

As you can see, every agent would have 4 TAGS and, based on tags, I could grup them  having informations about, i.e.:

• Which agents are linux servers? (TAG: linux, server)
• Which agents are managed by customers and are located in DATACENTER1? (TAG: server, datacenter1)
• Which agents are office workstations and located in office1? (TAG: office1, workstation)

This is my prupose? Starting using OCS Inventory now, it's better I'm creating the setup correctly from the beginning. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Many thanks!

Simon

Answer 5

Hi Simon,
my native language not being that of Shakespeare but rather that of Molière... Do you speak French ?

Ok, with your new details I understand your need better !

In your case, I think you could create additional fields (tags) in "Manage > Administrative data" so that you can make multiple selections.

You are right to think about this now, you have a strategy to study upstream of your agents deployment.

Regards, Stéphane

Answer 6

Thanks Stéphane!

Sorry, my native language is not Shakespeare's ones as well, more Dante's one :-)

Great suggestion, this could do the trick! The GUI is intuitive, but some aspects I need to know better (I'll ask those in other threads ;-) ).

Are those new tags then configurable on the agent to be sent from the agent at startup or first-run? I've seen only one TAG to be sent. Could you in case show me the ocsinventory.ini directive to do that?

Bye, Simon

Answer 7

Simon,

I'm glad you like my proposal !

In order to discover an interesting example of what can be done with tags, I advise you to go see :

http://demo.ocsinventory-ng.org/

But I do not know if another tag than the default tag can be automatically assigned to a client when deploying the agent ...

> I think this will have to be done manually in the "administrative data" section of your inventoried machine (in the OCS server interface)... Less fun !

(Finally, the English language will agree ..! lol)

Answer 8

I'll look the demo site more in deep.

Thanks for the support!!

Simon

Answer 9

I'm glad to have helped you, have a good day ! Bye !