Host GLPI without installing anything
Asset inventory and the service desk in one tool: every machine known by its serial number, every ticket attached to the device and to the contract that covers it.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
GLPI installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. The French reference for IT asset management and support: hardware inventory, tickets, contracts, licences and a knowledge base. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. GLPI carries a wide database schema — hardware, software, tickets, contracts, entities — and runs automatic actions all the time: receiving inventory reports, reconciling them with existing records, computing deadlines, sending notifications. On a fleet of two or three hundred machines it is that background work, not the screens, that justifies the headroom.
The real question at the start is the first inventory. Since version 10, GLPI has its own agent: installed on the machines, it reports hardware configuration, serial numbers, installed software and network settings, then keeps the record up to date on its own. It can also take over an existing OCS inventory, and CSV injection remains available for whatever has no agent — printers, monitors, technical equipment.
What GLPI can do
An inventory that updates itself
The agent installed on the machines declares the model, serial number, memory, disks, software and network addressing. The asset register stops being a spreadsheet that was out of date the day after it was written.
Service desk, deadlines and a user portal
Requests arrive through a form or by email, file themselves by category, carry a contractual deadline and escalate as it approaches. Users follow their own ticket instead of phoning to ask where it stands.
Hierarchical entities
The estate is divided into sites, subsidiaries or clients, and each technician only sees the scope that concerns them. That is what makes GLPI usable by a provider managing several organisations in a single instance.
Contracts, warranties and depreciation
Purchase date, end of warranty, supplier, maintenance contract, residual value: "which machines come out of warranty next year" becomes a search rather than an effort of memory.
What people actually use it for
A local authority's IT estate
Two hundred machines spread across the town hall, the schools and the technical services. Staff report a fault from the portal, and the IT team knows which machine is involved before setting off.
A provider managing several clients
One entity per client, technicians assigned to the entities that concern them, and invoicing based on dated tickets rather than on end-of-month recollection.
The computer rooms of a school
The IT coordinator knows what is in each room, finds the troublesome machine by its inventory number and keeps a trace of interventions from one year to the next.
Preparing a replacement budget
A manufacturing SME pulls the list of machines over five years old, the licences coming up for renewal and the cost of current contracts. The budget discussion rests on figures rather than impressions.
Taking over an estate nobody has a list of
An IT team of three inherits an undocumented environment. The agent, deployed in waves, rebuilds the inventory in a few weeks, without walking round the offices with a notebook.
Hosted in France
In our own datacentre in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. An asset inventory describes your organisation; there is no reason to store it elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Nothing for the application itself: it is online a few minutes after you order. One detail specific to GLPI: for the inventory to fill itself in, the agent has to be deployed on the machines. It is a small executable, pushed by a group policy or by whatever deployment tool you already use.
Three routes coexist. The GLPI agent is the right one for anything that boots an operating system: it declares the machine and keeps it current afterwards. An existing OCS Inventory NG database can be imported. And for whatever has no agent — monitors, printers, UPS units, technical equipment — CSV injection remains the quickest method.
Yes. GLPI synchronises with an LDAP directory or an Active Directory: users and groups are imported, authentication uses the usual password, and arrivals and departures propagate without duplicate data entry.
That is the right question to ask. GLPI is a project, not an application you simply open in the morning: it gives back what you put into categories, entities and service commitments. If the need is just a shared request inbox, FreeScout or Kanboard take a tenth of the setup. If, on the other hand, the question is "what hardware do we own, where is it and when does the warranty end", GLPI has no real equivalent in free software.
Yes, they are part of the service. A self-hosted application left un-updated is a security risk, not a saving.