Inventory tool, ETL and collectors: a complete data chain
With close to 52,000 computers across the Centre-Val de Loire schools, the estate needs rigorous, centralised management.
It starts locally. Each school runs its own inventory through opsi, the asset management tool from uib, installed on every site. An ETL process then collects data from each of those local instances, consolidates it against other sources, and pushes it up to the central iTop platform Recia operates.
That populates the CMDB automatically and continuously. It holds every machine, where it physically sits – building, floor, room – and everything the support team needs to act on it.
Impact analysis and visualisation
Consolidating the data this way gives Recia a view of the complete infrastructure across every school. It also drives impact analysis: when the monitoring system reports an incident, iTop produces a dependency graph showing the affected component and everything connected to it.
“When a switch goes down, the impact analysis tells us exactly which connected equipment is also unavailable,” explains Chloé Fonck. “That lets us judge how critical the incident really is.”
Because the data is centralised, iTop can present the estate at different levels. Alongside the overviews Recia uses centrally, permissions restrict what each IT team can see to its own organisations. “A regional or departmental partner only sees their own group of schools,” she says.
Data quality is the real work
The main challenge in centralised management is keeping the data trustworthy.
“If consolidation flags data as poor quality, we can give the object a particular status, implementation, for example,” says Chloé Fonck. “That tells the support teams we are not certain the equipment is properly covered or configured to standard. It’s the sort of situation we want to avoid.”
To stay ahead of quality and consistency problems, one member of the Recia IT team is responsible for analysing and maintaining the CMDB data on a regular basis.
“Those audits let us spot data that is irrelevant or incomplete and act on it. A network device with no uplink, or one marked obsolete while still attached to a school, is exactly the kind of case that needs correcting.”
Managing hardware obsolescence
The data iTop collects has also improved how Recia manages the PC lifecycle.
“By recording purchase dates, warranty dates and usage rates, decision-makers know the state of the estate and can plan ahead,” Chloé Fonck points out. “It’s an excellent decision support tool for investment and hardware renewal.”
It makes obsolescence easier to handle in practice. When a computer is retired it is not deleted from iTop, it simply changes status. That makes it possible to analyse rotation, redeployment and machine lifespan, and to build a renewal policy on evidence rather than estimates.
