What is Inventory Manager?
Inventory Manager is a centralized inventory management application for Itential Platform that consolidates your automation targets in one location. Instead of managing inventory across multiple distributed automation gateway instances, you can organize and manage all your devices, endpoints, and systems from one location.
You can create multiple inventories, each containing nodes (your automation targets) and actions (operations you can perform on those nodes). Organize your inventories by device type, region, function, or any structure that fits your operational needs, and control access through role-based permissions.
Inventory Manager integrates seamlessly with IAG 5, Gateway Manager, Configuration Manager, and command templates, providing backward compatibility with existing Device Broker operations while giving you the flexibility to transition to next-generation automation architectures.
Key capabilities
- Centralized management: Manage all your automation targets from a single location instead of distributing inventory across multiple gateway instances.
- Flexible integration: Populate inventories from any inventory system.
- Role-based access control: Control who can view, create, modify, delete, and execute operations on inventories, nodes, actions, and tags through RBAC at the inventory level.
- Automated updates: Schedule workflows to keep your inventories synchronized with your inventory systems.
- Device Broker compatibility: Work seamlessly with Configuration Manager and command templates through backward-compatible Device Broker integration.
- Parallel operation: Run IAG 4 and Inventory Manager side by side during migration, giving you time to transition without disrupting operations.
How Inventory Manager fits into the Itential ecosystem
Inventory Manager integrates with several Itential products:
- IAG 5: Inventory Manager routes action execution to IAG services, which connect to and manage your devices.
- Gateway Manager: Manages the connection between Inventory Manager, IAG 5 clusters, and Itential Platform, handling service execution and inventory data transfer.
- Configuration Manager: Uses Device Broker to access inventory devices for golden configuration and compliance operations.
- Command templates: Executes command templates (MOP) against inventory devices through Device Broker integration.
- Device Broker: The Inventory Manager adapter exposes inventories to Device Broker, maintaining compatibility with existing workflows and applications. For more information, see Device Broker support.
Architecture overview
Inventory Manager consists of four main components:
- Inventories: Logical containers that group related automation targets and define the actions that can be performed on them.
- Nodes: Individual devices, endpoints, or systems within an inventory. Each node has flexible attributes you define based on your device requirements.
- Actions: Operations you can execute against inventory nodes, such as retrieving configurations or running commands.
- Tags: Labels you can apply to inventories and nodes for organization, filtering, and classification.
The Inventory Manager adapter exposes these components to Device Broker, allowing Configuration Manager and command templates to interact with inventory devices. For more information, see Device Broker support.
For detailed information about these components, see Inventory Manager concepts.
Product requirements
To use Inventory Manager, you need:
- Itential Platform 6.3 or later
- Gateway Manager 1.0.5 or later
- IAG 5.3 or later
What's next?
- Install and configure Inventory Manager
- Learn about core concepts and the data model
- Migrate from IAG 4 (if applicable)
- Create your first inventory and populate it with nodes