What about industrial inventory? ICS, PLC, robots

Question

Hi,

How does OCS inventory cope with industrial equipments, such as controllers, robots, and so on?

I mean first all industrial equipments one can find in a plant or factory, but which are IP-reachable. We can put for later equipments which are on industrial networks (CIP, modbus, profinet, etc).

So, here's the situation: in a plant or a factory, I mean an industrial site, there are many equipments connected to the network: classic workstations of course, some servers (windows, Linux, VMS, etc), but also industrial equipments such as ICS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_control_system ), PCL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller ) and robots just to name a few.

I searched the documentation for PLC, ICS, industrial, but could not find anything relevant.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

Hi cactux,

since the operating systems of such devices as controllers, robots, ICSs and PCLs are quite diverse you won't find an agent for most of those systems (maybe for some of them that run Linux). But you can identify them in your inventory software if they have an IP-Adress!

To identify them it is easiest if you have a PC with a working agent in the same subnet that is allowed to IP-Discover the subnet or use SNMP if configured. It will give you a list of all discovered devices in the subnet with MAC-Adress, IP, FQDN, Subnet-Mask and Date of Discovery that is not in your inventory.

You then can identify them with a click and give the device a description and set a customizable "Type" to them from a customizable dropdown Menu. I use this do identify devices like routers, gateways, switches and other devices that won't run agents on themselves. Identified devices can then be shown for either specific subnets or all your subnets and thus keep track of them. Super useful if you want to make sure there is no discovered device that is not either identified or inventorized with an agent (this would be the ideal state).

So you most likely won't be able to get all those fancy details like an agent can give you if the operating system won't allow the installation of an agent BUT you can keep track of them all!

I hope this is an answer you were looking for.

Answer 2

Thanks you DarKFeeliN :)

I'll try as you suggest.

I have more questions related to this first one:

1. With the MAC address of the Ethernet card, does OCS Inventory fill the manufacturer automatically?

2. These equipments are usually SNMP-compatible, can this allow to feed more information into OCS, such as firmware version?

Thanks again :)

Answer 3

1. With the MAC address of the Ethernet card, does OCS Inventory fill the manufacturer automatically?

This actually is the case. It shows the MAC-Adress and then in brackets the manufacturer if it is known to OCS Inventory. I don't know from which lists they get their Manufacturer information but it works pretty well. Only some virtual MAC-adresses are shown as unknown.

2. These equipments are usually SNMP-compatible, can this allow to feed more information into OCS, such as firmware version?

As far as I know this will not be the case. There is a seperate list with SNMP-discovered devices that adds some info like a domain or type but I haven't worked with that enough to give a consistent answer to that.

But maybe here is someone who has more experience with SNMP in OCS Inventory.