ITop

What is iTop?

iTop is a software for managing IT services/tickets and resources, and keeping track of end users and devices and their status. It is similar to Spiceworks, if you have used that software.

Here is its full official description: iTop is a complete, OpenSource, IT Operational Portal.

It includes:

• A complete CMDB (Configuration management database) to document and manage the IT inventory.
• An Incident management module to track and communicate about all issues occurring in the IT.
• A change management module to plan and track the changes to the IT environment.
• A known error database to speed up the resolution of incidents.
• An outage module to document all planned outages and notify the appropriate contacts.
• Dashboards to quickly get an overview of your IT.

All the modules can be setup, step by step, indepently of each other.

iTop is service provider oriented, it allows IT engineers to manage easily multiple customers or organizations. iTop, delivers a feature-rich set of business processes that:

• Enhances IT management effectiveness
• Drives IT operations performance
• Improves customer satisfaction and provides executives with insights into business performance.

iTop is completely open to be integrated within your current IT Management infrastructure.

Adopting this new generation of IT Operational portal will help you to:

• Better manage a more and more complex IT environment.
• Implement ITIL processes at your own pace.
• Manage the most important asset of your IT: Documentation.

Initial Setup

Prerequisites

First you must install a web server software. Use whatever you are most comfortable or familiar with. We usually use Apache, and we will be using a Ubuntu machine (17.10 server with a gui installed. Can be downloaded here. You will also need to install PHP, graphviz, and MySQL to run iTop.

Here are the commands you need to run if you are using a version of Ubuntu 16.04 or Higher:

apt-get install apache2

apt-get install mysql-server

apt-get install php php-mysql php-ldap php-mcrypt php-cli php-soap php-json graphviz

apt-get install php-xml php-gd php-zip libapache2-mod-php

IMPORTANT: The commands are different for other versions of linux, including pre-16.04 versions of Ubuntu. And the installation process if very different for a Windows host

Installing iTop

You will need to download the iTop .zip file, which is currently located here. Download the latest version.

You now need to unzip the file, and in Linux (at least Ubuntu), you need to install a program to do so. The recommended program is zip, which can be installed by typing this command: sudo apt-get install zip .

TIP: You may need to run sudo apt-get update before trying to install zip

Then to unzip the file run unzip (file_name_here).zip .

You know need to make the install directory for iTop. This can be done by running this command: mkdir /var/www/html/itop

Then move the content of the "web" directory just created from the unzip to the itop directory you just created. This can be done with these commands here:

cd /var/www/html/itop

cp -r /Downloads/web/* .

IMPORTANT: The last command is dependent on where you unzipped the iTop .zip file.

Now you will open a web browser and go to the IP of the host computer, with the ending of /itop (for example, localhost/itop if on the host or 10.21.25.60/itop). This will send you to the installation wizard if everything is properly configured. Follow the directions on the installation wizard, and if you need help it can be found here. But the things the wizard asks for are very dependent on your configuration.

Official Instructions

The official directions can be found here.