Alchemy Network Inventory

An office environment, and even a homegroup is composed of multiple devices connected to the same network, for easy sharing, management, and monitoring. In case your PC is the head of the herd, then applications like Alchemy Network Inventory can be used to check and analyze all connected devices.

Running it for the first time brings up a setup wizard to help you with initial steps. This is useful for quickly telling the application what to scan, with several options such as IP range, or simply computers from a MIcrosoft Windows Network, like domains or workgroups.

It can take a little while to to scan all network elements, because both software and hardware components are analyzed. What’s more, you need to be sure your computer has access to all network devices, otherwise results are not retrieved from them. When the list is generated, you can select which devices to leave in your project.

This finally brings you to the main window, which is pretty intuitive and doesn’t pose any accommodation problems. All identified devices are stored in a tree view on a side panel for quick access. All details are then displayed in tabs for easy navigation in the rest of the space, with links to major areas, making the whole experience rather comfortable.

Looking at the amount and depth of data gathered, you might say this is a must-have for any network administrator. Major areas let you view data for general, operating system, hardware, software, network, multimedia, custom data, and other, each with multiple sub-categories.

However, the identification process leaves a lot to be desired, because it does not properly identify all PC components. For instance, Windows 8 was thought to be 7, with DirectX 9 instead of 11, and more.

Gathered data can be put to good use. There aren’t any built-in management options, such as to remove applications, not even from your PC, but a large variety of reports can be generated. First of all, data can be exported to SQL or Access databases, as well as Excel, CSV, and TXT files. Second, reports can be generated for all areas, and are neatly organized in tables you can print out.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Alchemy Network Inventory is a neat application to keep around for simple network inventorying tasks. Depth of gathered data and areas covered are impressive, and so are the types and style of generated reports. The only thing that affects overall practicality is component identification.