iTop - IT Service Management & CMDB

I have 18 years of web design (including CSS/JavaScript), OO Perl programming, and Linux systems administration experience. I have written more than one web app in my time, and plenty of DB-driven applications. The good: * The user interface, once you get used to it, is fairly simple and very clean. I generally like it. * The PHP objects appear to be well organized, with good modularity and good object extension. * You can import batches of objects as CSVs. * It has internationalization language files. The bad: * Not all CSV imports work. For example, the FunctionalCI <-> Document Link CSV import fails. This is particularly glaring in 2016, considering that you can find people asking for help with that back in 2014. * The database has zero key constraints on it. None. Nunca. Nada. * I have no idea where lookup values (such as Operating System family names) come from. The base table has a list of IDs, and that's it. If you use the right view (for example, view_OSVersion), they show up. * Linkages to FunctionalCIs are not obvious. There are lnk* tables for creating links, but sometimes you have to enter additional FunctionalCIs for the linkage type (for example, OtherSoftware <-> FunctionalCI linkages). The ugly: * The show create view syntax results. Seriously, if you look at it, you might go blind. Even after I reformatted it and edited it in vim with syntax highlighting enabled, it was nearly unreadable. * The support. All I get is Sourceforge and Google, and those aren't particularly helpful. I have mostly had to rely on reading the source, viewing the table and view creation SQL, and trial and error. The missing: * iTop brags that you can integrate it with other systems via ETL to pull data in from other sources. It turns out that that means you need a programmer (yours or one of theirs) to write custom software to do that. If you're doing something basic with it, or have a small operation, it is probably OK. If you want to automate anything (particularly linking CIs), be prepared for a heavy time and effort investment.

All in all I think the product is good. What is seriously lacking is support. The forums are poorly monitored. You can see questions that have been asked in 2012 still not addressed. The documentation needs to be more detailed and up to date as well. The GUI is easily navigated and the performance of searching is good as well. CSV imports are sketchy mind you with some glaring bugs. All in all a decent toolset. With some time and effort it could be great.

Standalone is okay if you like manually inputting everything. No easy way (or documentation) on how to sync with other common systems (ocs/glpi/fusioninventory). Talend has some promise so you can transform the data and insert it into iTop but, makeing the relationships is a beast. For example, Inserting a computer and os and software are easy. Linking them all together is where you will start pulling your hair out. Doesn't seem to be any plugins for this either, ie: no community. For small shops with a little to track, this is okay but, if you are that small, this is overkill. No network scanning either....