Performance considerations

Your IT department no doubt wants to make maximum use of the investment that your organization has made in the IT Assets under your control, so if you're going to start auditing the machines on your network, how is this going to affect performance and resource usage on your network?

The short answer is probably not a lot, but there are certainly a few things you'll want to avoid, particularly if your organization uses any slow/expensive WAN or Internet connections to connect parts of the network(s) that you manage.

Even on a LAN network, it doesn't hurt to know exactly how the different components of your network auditing solution are interacting, in case you want to optimize network bandwidth or in case you have a lot of equipment to audit in a limited amount of time.

Let's start by summarizing the audit process and any aspects of this that might affect performance.   As you can see from the diagram, in order to collect information about a PC or asset and store this in our IT inventory, there are three basic steps involved. Firstly, our auditing agent collects information about the machine (PC Audit) and compiles this into an audit snapshot. Secondly, the audit snapshot must be sent to our Enterprise Server (Post back). Lastly, Enterprise Server will process this audit snapshot, comparing it against existing information in the databases and/or adding any new information and/or raising any alerts as required.