Cut ITSM and ITAM Costs with Open Source

Meet The Hosts

Chris Bland

CEO & Co-Founder, BDQ.cloud

Chris has multiple years of experience in the software lifecycle, and using Work Management products to underpin this process. His company, BDQ, has been helping companies such as Clarks, Rainforest Alliance and The International Aids Society deploy and integrate the software effectively.

BDQ is a UK & US-based leader in ITSM solutions, specialising in consulting, implementation, and training services for tools like HaloITSM, Atlassian, GLPI, Monday.com and Asana. BDQ provides painless, professional Work Management solutions to Enterprises, Public Sector and mid-market customers in the UK, US and EU.

GLPI Demo presented by Craig Freeman | Consultant, BDQ

Virginie Nivard

Channel Manager, Teclib GLPI

Virginie is the Channel Manager at Teclib GLPI, specializing in partner relations and business development for open-source ITSM solutions. With deep expertise in GLPI’s IT service management, asset tracking, and discovery tools, she helps organizations adopt cost-effective, scalable ITSM strategies worldwide.

GLPI is an incredible Service Management software based on open-source technologies. It helps you plan and manage IT changes in an easy way, solve problems efficiently, automate your business processes and gain control over your IT infrastructure.

Video Transcript

- Intro -

Chris Bland: Hi there, everyone. So this is a webinar that we’re doing - BDQ - in conjunction with Teclib, who are authors of the GLPI product. Today we're going to talk about a licensing model, how GLPI can benefit people wanting an ITSM or asset management solution. With me today, I've got Craig Freeman from BDQ, who going to do a short demo, and Virginie, who's actually from Teclib, who's going to talk about, some history of Teclib and the licensing model.

Virginie Nivard: Good afternoon, yeah. Good afternoon everyone. So today I'm going to introduce you to GLPI Actually it's the most, powerful opensource IT service management solution available today on the market. Whether you need help with management, asset tracking, financial oversight or I.T project coordination, GLPI provides, the tool, that you would need to, for your personal and to reduce the cost.

We - I'm going to explore. So we are Teclib we're the publisher of GLPI, the official publisher of GLPI. We were before integrator and since 2009, we took over the publishing of our solution. So we're going to explore two key offerings today. So we are on the top of the open source IT software that we, make available for our customers.

We have a GLPI network cloud. It's a fully managed SaaS solution, and we have GLPI On-Premise subscription, to give you complete control of your ITSM environment with professional support. By the end of this talk, we'll have a clear idea, I think, of which option, that would be best fit for your business model.

So why choose GLPI? What makes a company choose GLPI? GLPI is a complete IT service management suite with a ticketing system, asset tracking, project and financial management. We have plug ins included in our solution. It's an open source, cost effective solution as well. And it's in compliance with security. And our business model, gives you full control over your data and IT operations.

We have plugins as well included. So talking about GLPI Network Cloud, for companies or looking for a hassle-free management solution, GLPI Network Cloud offer is ideal for businesses that want a quick, ITSM solution with shared system resources. The pricing of it is €19 per month, which is £16 per month for IT agents.

We offer as well a private cloud, for companies needing, needing dedicated resources and advanced security features. The pricing is €20 per month. Which is around £18 a month. So this offer is available from 25 users only.

Chris Bland: And the, and the on-prem license, Virginie?

Virginie Nivard: Yeah?

Chris Bland: Do you want to talk about that?

Virginie Nivard: Yeah, the on-prem license. So it's, a lot of our organization prefer, on premise because of data security for customization, for control. So for this, we have three subscription. So we have the Basic subscription, dedicated for small IT teams or small I.T companies. It covers up, up to 500 I.T. assets and up to ten users, includes, one production instance, and you have one testing instance. And you have access to plugins as well. And the level three support from us from the publisher, Teclib. And the pricing is at €1,200 per year, which is around £1,000 per year.

So we have as well the standard subscription. It's perfect for medium size, companies. It covers up up to 5000 IT assets and up to 50 IT agents. It includes two productions instances and two testing environments. It's more flexible for growing IT teams. So, it's usually the, the, this solution that will go for. And then we have the advanced subscription. So it designed for large companies, large organization using complex IT structures. It's over five I.T. Assets and more than 50 users. So for this subscription you have five productions instances and five testing environments. So you have full support, exclusive plugins and system resources. That's that's it.

Chris Bland: Yeah. And the the GLPI network plugins are additional plugins, supported by technical, which extend some of the functionality. And you get that included with a network subscription.

Virginie Nivard: Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Bland: Yeah. And Craig will show a couple of those later. And, I think some of your customers are very large as well, actually aren't. But it's not just small customers use this.

Virginie Nivard: Yeah. We have we have it goes from small customers to very large customers. So for example, very well known customers, we have Airbus, we have Emirates. We have the Space Agency European Union as well. So, that's that's some example of the large, customers that we have.

Chris Bland: And, I think one of the interesting things about GLPI as well, it's got quite powerful asset discovery, piece to it. So it's not just you then have to have something to populate and CMDB. It can actually do that as well. And that's something we'll get into. So that's a little bit about the licensing of this. So as Virginia said, just to summarize, you can either get it cloud based and, I'm right in saying the number of assets that you can have in the databases is unlimited on the cloud, isn't it?

Virginie Nivard: Yeah. It's unlimited.

Chris Bland: Yeah. So it's just a straight fee per agent. Whereas the on prem licenses, as you can see there, there are various tiers - small, medium and large. In terms of, in terms of the architecture, if you're wondering about hosting it, it's something you can do. Well, we can help you with it's basically a pretty much a standard LAMP stack - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. You can get at, get at the database if you want to do your own integrations and you can write your own plugins. This is an open source tool. It is I think, yeah, some of the people we spoke to also particularly like it for situations where they want, for example, air gapped, secure solution that can run completely independently of the internet for data security purposes.

So, yeah, you can have a cloud offering, but as you say, you can have it completely self-hosted with no connection to the internet at all, if that's what you want, A few notes about its core features. Actually, it's, it's got a very, extensive CMBD already basically configured and works with the asset management part. So all the reference data about, you know, licensing, computers, architectures and so forth is already, pre-configured and it works with the agent out of the box.

So if you're looking for a solution which can actually help you with your, asset discovery, and you like the idea of open source, it can be very good fit. It's also got helpdesk. So you can arrange tickets against these, against assets like discovery or just in general, and it's got some other modules around project management and financial management. It can support multiple organizations now these, inside the tool, are called entities. But if you’ve got situations where maybe you've got, multiple branch offices or sub locations or, or different customers which are organized in different sort of structures, GLPI is really quite powerful in the way that you can set up, a hierarchy of entities and then have permissions, essentially, set up around those entities and organizations. So, for example, people, you know, you know, one customer, people from there will only see their own assets and so forth system and so it’s got an extensive permissions and organizational structure system there. it's got a lot of support, things covered out of the box. It's got, as I say, it’s actually got, you know, very powerful asset management database actually, which can be extended with one of the add-ins as well if there's additional things they want to put in

But you can see out of the box it has, all the things you'd expect component, cartridges, computers, software, appliances, and so forth. A little bit about how it works architecturally, because we often get asked this how how does it go out and discover things? It's it uses an agent based architecture. So, you would have the agent installed on computers typically. And where you want the information coming back from. And the agent can pull the information from the local computer and send it back to the GLPI server, but, and populate the database. You could also grab - the agent if you want to interrogate SNMP compatible things such as, routers and so forth. You do need an agent installed on a computer somewhere, which will then go out and talk to an SNMP-based things and pull back information from them.

But broadly speaking, how the object in the ancient works, and this is the small stuff the local agent will pull back for you, for example, on a computer, or pull back all the information - and you'll see the later about what it does pull back - monitor, devices and software and so forth. Pulls back a lot of information and then network inventory again, if you can get to over SNMP, it’ll bring information back in that and a little example of the sorts of things you can do with switches, routers, UPS, all sorts of hardware, things you find on network.

And there's that example of a network switch, for example, I can see the number of ports and the number of slots in a particular port and so forth. This is part of the GLPI UI. And you'll see this more when Craig demos it, this very typically set up to go and look at an object in GLPI, and then you have all the pages of information segmented down the left hand side. And there's usually a lot of, a lot of information that it grabs back to you. It also deals with VMware the hosts in them. So for example, I might be to see the various VM guests that are in and ESX host, which is very nice. And it's not just me and my ESX is a whole bunch of other virtualization containers as well, which are supported.

As I say, it does this, remember, it's open source and it’ll do this, kind of, out of the box once you've done your configuration and the agent essentially, as you'd expect, basically can be scheduled or you can just run it manually or its even got sort of service, which pushes things, back. Now, that's probably enough about me talking about this, Craig would you now like to, sort of, maybe give us a short demo of how it looks in practice?

Craig Freeman: Absolutely. So I'll bring this up now, if you just let me know when that's up for everyone to see.

Chris Bland: There we go. Yeah, I can see that.

Craig Freeman: Yeah. So here's, an entry into GLPI we'd call the landing page. As a quick note, you'll see the entity and permission structure they've got. So that's variable between, your profiles. So you can see here I'm on the root entity, which is our top level structure. We have thrown in just a quick sub entity so that can exist for one of the other organizations or branches that we spoke about.

In the example, as part of this as well, you can have different permissions between different entities. So it's worth paying attention to, particularly for those cases that have data security is something that's high on your mind. You can really get granular with these permissions and break it down between the branches and the structure.

Overall, coming in, it's what you expect to see from ticket management systems. You can come in with a bit of a dashboard, show tickets are available. Personal view for myself as well as a group view, overall, which would need to be configured there. I've got nothing in it at the moment, and one of the plugins, which we found particularly helpful in managing tickets and service management, are the forms plugins within GLPI so you can customize the information that you're capturing as people raise tickets into your system.

So quick example of this. I've put up a little demonstration form for an incident. You can see it's looking for the summary, which is your title, a ticket. And you can have dynamic forms built into this as well. So where I've got what's been affected is a laptop here. You'll see we've got some, there's no display on the laptop, programs are crashing or it's running slow. If I were to swap this over to being for a printer, you can see that I've configured this form to then give options about printing so you can get dynamic forms, drill into the issues and submit tickets in through this.

So as an agent your tickets come through. You can see them through the queues here. Get quick dashboard which you can use as filters as well. And in the same way you can configure filters searching through the tickets in the system through these rules. Here. So lots of different properties to sort by, and you can apply those to go through the tickets in the system.

If I bring us into one of these here, you'll see details that have been captured by the form, the status of the ticket and those who are involved in it. Things you'd expect to see. You can link it into the GLPI Asset system, which I'll come onto showing you in a bit, but is very well developed. And allows you to track these issues against the assets themselves as well.

Coming through some of the UI of GLPI you've got details of when the ticket was taken into, or when it was opened, when it's been acted upon, if there's been any approvals or link to knowledge articles, as well as linking these out and making that knowledge available for your customers. So GLPI can host a knowledge management system as well as the tickets in the assets behind it in your organizations. As well as tracking a good historical base of what's happened with these tickets, getting through to it, as you see at the moment, it is all me, but I will differentiate between the other agents as well.

As part of GLPI it also brings in the concept of ITIL. So if that's something that you're working with or working towards, you've got the regular ITIL categories of tickets that are built into the system, and you can enact those pro... ITIL processes through GLPI. Next, here I'm going to take us over. Just a quick look at the assets. So as Chris and Virginie showed us before, these assets are all in out of the box from GLPI And I want to show you an example of how the agent brings data in. So we've used the agent to pull in some details from just a couple of the machines that we use at BDQ. And you'll see that it's got all of these details pulled in about the computer itself. What software? The operating system, the components that are within the computer. So you can get a really detailed breakdown of what's going on with these computers or assets on the network, that are discovered by GLPI . And like Chris said, the ability to detect virtualization as well are really impressive and quite handy feature for managing systems.

There’s, I think, one other plug in I'd show. So out of the box. GLPI got some good reporting features, and one of our favorite plug ins as well is the More Reporting. So out of the box you get your default reports that are built into the system. And the More Reporting plugin extends this out to as far as we found anything you could be looking for in terms of reporting within your ITSM and CMDB tools.

Chris Bland: Yeah, this is something you get with a GLPI network licence always available to you and supported. Yeah.

Craig Freeman: Yes. I think that's a good quick round up of GLPI Unless you can think of anything else that we should show while we're here.

Chris Bland: It's a very, a brief round up of how you, how you raise tickets, some of the reporting that's available, what the assets actually look like and how that asset base actually gets into it. I know everyone, people typically have limited in time - are there, are there any questions at all? We try to allow some time at the end of the questions. And you can do Q&A through, the, Q&A panel on Teams

Yeah. No questions? Well look, I hope I gave you, an introduction to the licensing model from GLPI its users and large, very large customers have been around for many years. It's got a powerful asset management system. It's extensible. It's got a robust ticket management system. It deals with multiple locations. We are BDQ we are reseller of GLPI and we can also, configure it for you. And if you’d like us to do that and, again, I'd like to sort of thank Virginie today from Teclib GLPI for her time, explaining and running over the license model.

Virginie Nivard: You know, it was a pleasure. If there are no questions, I'm thinking, we can test your solution on the cloud. It's available on the cloud only. So, I don't know if you could share the link, after on the webinar. So, whoever is on this call today could test our solution for 45 days. It's a free trial. And it will allow them to test our solution and the professional subscription as well. It's on the cloud only.

Chris Bland: And that. Yeah, that's the. Yeah, that's your cloud. The cloud version only And you can test on there and you can run it on prem. We'll keep it on the cloud, can’t you, as you want.

Virginie Nivard: Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Bland: So I think in fact I'll pop that in. I'll pop that in the, in the chat. Now. That's registration. And if you go there, you can create an instance and get 45 free days. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much. And I look forward to if there's any questions, please get in contact with us.

Virginie Nivard: Thank you very much for your time.

Chris Bland: Yeah. Thank you, thank you. Bye.

Craig Freeman: Thanks all.

- Outro -