IT Asset Management and Help Desk Tools for Small IT Teams

This page is for the one-to-five person IT team that looks after an office network, a few servers and a hundred-odd laptops, and needs two things that bigger shops buy as one expensive suite: an accurate list of what it owns, and a queue where requests do not get lost. The short answer: discover with a scanner, audit with an inventory tool, keep ownership and lifecycle in an asset register, and run tickets in a help desk that can point at those asset records. For most small teams that means Open-AudIT or the GLPI Agent for inventory, Snipe-IT or GLPI for the register, and osTicket, Zammad or GLPI for tickets.

The short list

Find out what is actually on the network

Every asset project starts with a sweep. Angry IP Scanner is the fastest way to get a CSV of live hosts with hostnames, MAC vendors and open ports. Enable the MAC Address and MAC Vendor fetchers, then sort by vendor to separate printers, access points and stray Raspberry Pis. It also runs from a script:

ipscan -f:range 10.0.10.1 10.0.10.254 -s -q -o lan-scan.csv

MAC data is only visible on the scanner’s own Layer 2 segment, so run it from a host inside each VLAN or accept router-level data for remote ones.

SoftPerfect Network Scanner adds what Angry IP Scanner deliberately leaves out: WMI and remote registry queries, share enumeration and headless runs. A nightly scheduled task that writes a dated CSV gives you a cheap “new device appeared” alert when you diff the files:

netscan.exe /hide /config:"C:Scansoffice.xml" /range:10.0.10.1-10.0.10.254 /auto:"C:Scansoffice_%yyyy%%mm%%dd%.csv"

Remember that the unlicensed version shows at most 10 devices; a suspiciously small result is the licence limit, not a quiet network.

Build a hardware and software inventory

A sweep tells you an address is alive. An inventory tells you it is a Dell with 8 GB of RAM, Windows 11 and a copy of Visio nobody approved. Two approaches work for small teams.

Agentless: Open-AudIT discovers subnets with Nmap and then logs in over WMI (Windows), SSH (Linux) and SNMP (network gear). The free edition covers 100 devices, which fits most small offices. Load credentials first, run discovery per subnet, then read the discovery log for hosts that answered Nmap but rejected every credential. Those are your blind spots, and they are usually a firewall rule for remote WMI or an SSH account without sudo. Scheduling is a paid feature, so in the free edition you rerun discoveries by hand, and change detection between audits shows what was installed or removed.

Agent-based: GLPI 10 and later accept inventory natively from the GLPI Agent, which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and also handles network discovery and SNMP inventory. Agents report on a schedule even from laptops that are rarely in the office, which an agentless scanner cannot reach. Pointing an agent at the server is one setting:

glpi-agent --server https://glpi.example.lan/

Use agents for roaming laptops and agentless audits for servers, switches and printers. If you just need a serial number from one machine, Get-CimInstance Win32_BIOS | Select-Object SerialNumber in PowerShell is quicker than any tool.

Map which switch port each device is on

Inventory rarely answers “where is this thing physically plugged in?” LanTopoLog reads switch forwarding tables (Bridge-MIB) over SNMP and resolves every MAC and IP to a switch port, with no installer. Give it a read-only community restricted to the scanning host, and test the switch first:

snmpwalk -v2c -c ro-community 10.0.0.2 1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.2

If that returns nothing, fix the switch ACL before blaming the tool. Topology discovery works unregistered; VLAN display, search and web publishing stop after a while until you register. NetCrunch draws Layer 2 and VLAN maps automatically as part of a full monitoring server, which makes sense if you need monitoring anyway.

Track ownership and lifecycle: who has which laptop

Discovery data does not know that laptop LT-0142 belongs to the new sales manager, was bought with a three-year warranty and must come back when she leaves. That is the job of an asset register.

Snipe-IT is built for exactly this. It separates assets (tagged items where the specific unit matters, such as laptops and phones), accessories (keyboards, mice), components (RAM, drives that get checked out to an asset), consumables (toner) and software licences with seats. Everything is checked out to a person, location or asset and checked back in, so the history of a device follows it. It imports from CSV and has a REST API, so you can push serials from your inventory instead of typing them.

GLPI covers the same lifecycle (assets, contracts, suppliers, licences, financial data) and adds agent inventory and a help desk in the same database. It is heavier to configure, but one system is easier to keep current than two.

Practical rules that make either work: one asset tag format, printed labels on every device, a required “assigned to” field, and an offboarding checklist that will not close until the assets are checked in.

Document racks, cables, IP addresses and VLANs

Asset registers handle end-user kit well and network infrastructure poorly. NetBox fills that gap: sites, racks, devices, cables, power, IP prefixes, VLANs, VRFs, circuits and virtual machines, with a full API. Its documentation is explicit that it models the intended state of the network and is not a monitoring tool, so pair it with discovery: use scanner output to find drift between NetBox and reality, then fix whichever side is wrong. It runs on Python/Django with PostgreSQL and Redis.

Run a ticket queue for a small team

The help desk software you choose matters less than getting every request into it. Close the side doors: one support mailbox, one portal, and a polite rule that hallway requests become tickets.

osTicket is the classic choice: emails become tickets through IMAP/POP3 fetching or piping, help topics route requests to departments, ticket filters trigger actions, SLA plans track due dates with escalation, and ticket locking stops two technicians replying to the same user.

Zammad has a more modern agent interface and more channels: email (including Microsoft 365 and Google mail connectors), web forms, chat, SMS, Telegram and WhatsApp. It includes SLAs, triggers, a knowledge base, time accounting and checklists. It needs PostgreSQL and Redis, and Elasticsearch is strongly recommended for search, so plan a slightly bigger VM or use the Docker Compose deployment.

GLPI tickets win when you want a ticket linked directly to the computer it concerns, without integrating two systems.

Whichever you pick, set up four things before go-live: categories that match how you report (hardware, accounts, software, network), an auto-reply that tells users what happens next, an SLA target for first response, and a few canned responses for password resets and printer jams. If you use osTicket or Zammad with a separate asset register, add an asset-tag field to the ticket form.

Turn monitoring alerts into tickets

Asset data goes stale unless something watches the important devices. PRTG Freeware monitors up to 100 sensors at no cost, about ten fully covered devices: the internet uplink, firewall, core switch, hypervisor and backup NAS. Auto-discovery can burn the sensor budget in minutes, so discover a small range and delete unneeded sensors before adding more. Send Down notifications to the help desk mailbox and the outage arrives as a ticket with a timestamp. NetCrunch integrates with ticketing directly (version 16 added ServiceNow) and also records configuration changes on network devices, which belongs in your asset history. Use dependencies in either tool so a dead uplink produces one ticket, not forty.

Give remote support without creating a security hole

The help desk needs remote control, and the licence matters. AnyDesk without a licence is for private, non-commercial use only; supporting colleagues or customers requires a paid plan, and AnyDesk detects and restricts commercial use. For unattended access, install it rather than running the portable build, set a long password and enable two-factor authentication. Sunlogin Remote (AweSun) has a free Personal edition for reaching your own devices; team use needs a paid edition, and sessions pass through the vendor’s cloud, which matters for data-residency policies. Old Sunlogin builds had exploited remote code execution flaws, so remove outdated installs.

Treat remote tools as assets too. Inventory which ones are installed, approve one, and remove the rest. A registry check run across the fleet with Invoke-Command or your RMM finds them:

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall*,
  HKLM:SoftwareWOW6432NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall* |
  Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -match 'AnyDesk|AweSun|Sunlogin' } |
  Select-Object PSComputerName, DisplayName, DisplayVersion

Who can use those tools, and with which accounts, is covered in our identity and access management hub. Scripting the onboarding and offboarding steps is covered in sysadmin automation tools.

How to choose

1. Count what you manage. Under 100 devices, Open-AudIT’s free edition and PRTG Freeware cover inventory and core monitoring at no cost. Above that, budget for agents (GLPI) or a paid edition.
2. Decide one system or two. If one person runs everything, GLPI’s combined asset management and help desk saves integration work. If you want the best register and the nicest ticket UI, use Snipe-IT with osTicket or Zammad and link them by asset tag.
3. Check your hosting. GLPI, Snipe-IT and osTicket run on an ordinary PHP and MySQL/MariaDB stack. Zammad and NetBox want PostgreSQL and Redis on Linux. PRTG and NetCrunch need a Windows server.
4. Separate network documentation from end-user assets. Add NetBox only when you have racks, many VLANs or address-planning pain; a small office can keep IP ranges in the asset register.
5. Pilot with real data. Import one department and run tickets for two weeks before rolling out.
6. License remote support properly. Personal tiers of AnyDesk and AweSun are not a help desk tool.

FAQ

What is the best free IT asset management software for a small business?

For a register of who has what, Snipe-IT (AGPL-3.0). For a register plus automatic inventory and tickets in one system, GLPI (GPL-3.0). For agentless inventory of up to 100 devices without deploying anything, the free edition of Open-AudIT.

Is there a free help desk with asset management built in?

Yes. GLPI includes both, and tickets can be linked to the computers and users in its inventory. osTicket and Zammad are ticket systems first, so pair them with a separate register.

osTicket or Zammad: which should a small IT team use?

osTicket if you want a light email-driven queue on a basic PHP and MySQL server. Zammad if you want a modern interface, more channels and a built-in knowledge base, and can run PostgreSQL, Redis and ideally Elasticsearch.

How do I find all devices on my network?

Sweep each subnet with Angry IP Scanner or SoftPerfect Network Scanner, audit what you find with Open-AudIT or the GLPI Agent, and use LanTopoLog to map each device to its switch port. Compare the results with DHCP leases to catch anything that only appears occasionally.

Can I use AnyDesk free for IT support at work?

No. AnyDesk without a licence is for private, non-commercial use only; any work use, including helping colleagues, requires a paid plan.

Is NetBox an asset management tool?

Partly. NetBox documents network infrastructure (devices, racks, cables, IP addresses, VLANs) as the intended state of the network. It does not discover or monitor devices and is not designed for laptops and peripherals assigned to users; use Snipe-IT or GLPI for those.

Last updated: 1 October 2026 · AdminHub Plus editorial team. Licence, version and platform details are checked against each developer's official documentation.