Hardware auditing tools

Speccy is an advanced information tool which is available as an installer and portable program. Speccy shows information about more hardware devices than CPU-Z. The information is a little different.

It can be termed as essential information as not all details about each device are shown. HWiNFO is a professional tool that can be used to gather all the details of each hardware component of the computer. HWiNFO supports most of the latest hardware standards and technologies. This can be highly useful for those who are looking for their system drivers for unknown devices. Although the information provided by HWiNFO is overwhelming, it is intelligently organized into easily understandable screens.

The benefit of HWiNFO is that it also displays real-time information about the hardware which is highly useful for monitoring hardware for health issues. Sandra Lite does a great job of not only extracting tiny bits of information about the computer hardware, it also pinpoints how each hardware component is running and performing in the computer.

The software is free for personal use and can be used on a single computer. WinAudit is basically an inventory software which can list down some detail about your system hardware. It shows information about installed hardware and software, licenses, security configuration, network information etc.

The information shown by WinAudit is not instant. This is also an extremely useful technique when you are training a new auditor, and you want to guide them without disrupting the flow of an interview with a subject matter expert. My second favorite hardware resource is an HD webcam mounted on a flexible arm with a clamp see picture above. The video quality is p instead of the p that is typical of a laptop camera.

The only thing I dislike about the webcam I am using is the audio quality. Therefore, I use a gaming headset with a microphone to record the audio, so I can hear the people I am interviewing better. Another alternative is high-quality microphone and headphones, as typically seen in use by podcasters. Even though the sound quality is ideal with a separate microphone and headphones, the cost is higher than most gaming headsets, and you will be tethered to microphone—either physically or at least virtually by the need to maintain a consistent distance between your mouth and the microphone.

The more hours you spend at the computer, the more you will appreciate the ability to stand up, adjust the camera, and move your legs a little. Finally, the last piece of essential remote auditing hardware is your mobile phone. Even with a desktop running Zoom, and a Pixelbook running Google Docs, I still need to ask audit team members questions and conduct quick internet searches. Therefore, your mobile phone is essential to keep with you, in silent mode, during your audit.

Your phone is much less disruptive. I use the phone to keep track of time, to set reminder alarms, and to send Slack messages with other people. You can also join a separate Zoom session on your phone, where an audit team member may need you the lead auditor to provide input on objective evidence or evaluation of conformity regarding specific quality system requirements. You might also want to take a quick picture of something you observe on video during the audit. If you record the Zoom session, you can always extract a still image, but taking a picture with your mobile phone is more convenient and takes less time.

You can then share the image with a Google Drive folder for your remote audit and copy the image into your audit report. As they say, a picture is worth 1, words. Currently, we are using Zoom as our video web conferencing software.

Still, we used to use GoToMeeting , and there is very little difference in the functionality of the two software platforms. One of the consequences of the COVID19 pandemic is that everyone is more familiar with web conferencing software. Currently, we are using Calendly as the automated appointment scheduling software application for our consulting business.

However, the functionality of software applications has changed dramatically in the past few years with better integration tools, such as Zappier.

These applications allow you to manage people, equipment, and conference rooms, but you can also integrate these applications with accounting business processes. We hosted three international training workshops, and we record training videos for medical device companies every week. Therefore, we gradually accumulated all of the accessories listed below. We also wanted the report to tell us more than whether or not a system was compliant; we wanted to understand in what way a system was out of compliance.

If it is, we use the existing container and refrain from uninstalling it at the end of the run. If we launch the container, we also register a handler to run at the end with notify: remove omsa. This way we only remove the container if we launched it. The third stanza executes a check utilizing the Dell OpenManage container. We also add this output to our larger report later.

The final task in our playbook role is a local action that only runs once and generates our report. And finally, here is a partial report in a comma-separated values CSV format that we ran against two hosts:.

The first line is a table header for the rest of the report. The last entry that has a True value in the Changed column indicates a divergence we needed to address. We then used this data to create tickets and schedule any required remediation work. Designing and extending these audit playbooks was very easy for everyone on the team, and by regularly running them across our initial infrastructure, we learned a lot about the critical settings that we needed to track and correct.

Using this knowledge we were able to move forward and implement a much more robust testing solution for our production launch using the Python-based TestInfra tool. He is a long-time system administrator and operations engineer who has lived in places ranging from Alaska to Pakistan. The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic.

Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub discuss. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites.