We have a tool at work, Kaseya, for our Windows machines. It handles updates, but also can report back information gathered from them: OS version, patches installed, time since last checkin, last user logged in, user most frequently logged in, plus details about hardware: RAM, disk size, serial number, etc. I’m looking for a tool that can do this on Linux as well.

Of course, we could roll our own; all the above is readily cleaned from standard commands plus examining /proc and /sys. But before we roll our own, we want to be sure there’s nothing else out there worth using.

Down the road, we might also like it to grow in another direction: centralized configuration, storing links between machines and people in a database, and generating DNS, DHCP, etc. configurations out of it. Whether that would be the same tool as this is another question.

There are, of course, expensive and overkilling well-known commercial packages to do this. We’re after something simple that gets the job done.

Any ideas?