Windows Auditing

I am the IT department for a small company.  The lead developer, system admin, DBA and desktop support.  The whole enchilada.  As you can imagine, my time is limited.

One of the major aspects of my job is to keep track of the various assets under my control.  This involves both hardware and software.  With shuffling machines from place to place, people changing jobs and the addition (or removal) of stuff makes this a moving target.

RunAs Radio recently had an episode (#150 with Doug Toombs) that brought some new tools to my attention.  The ones of interest are WinAudit and KeyFinder. 

WinAudit takes a quick look at the computer hardware and software.  It then dumps the data into a various number of formats from CSV, to PDF to actually stashing it in a database which is pretty cool.  The thing that makes this application smoking hot is that it can be run via the command line!

KeyFinder is a little less cool in that it doesn’t store it’s information to the database.  It does, however, dig deep to find the keys used to install the various software packages.  A definite boon in my line of work.

In future posts I will go through what steps I went through to install these packages in our production environment.  Hopefully the end result will be a database that can be used to keep track of our software compliance and the state of our aging fleet of machines.