Quick Start

Welcome to AlloyScan

AlloyScan is a network inventory and audit platform from Alloy Software. It continuously discovers, audits, and tracks the state of your IT assets — computers, network devices, printers, hypervisors, and cloud resources — across single-site and multi-site organisations.

This page introduces what AlloyScan does, who uses it, and how its main components fit together. To get hands-on, start by choosing the first inventory path that matches your environment.

What AlloyScan does

AlloyScan keeps a current picture of every server, workstation, switch, printer, hypervisor host, virtual machine, and cloud resource in your environment, with hardware and software detail and a record of changes over time.

You use AlloyScan to:

  • Stand up an inventory for a new organisation by deploying an Audit Service inside the network and defining the segments to scan.
  • Maintain a trustworthy current-state picture by scheduling regular scans and audits.
  • Detect unauthorised changes on critical assets through Change tracking and per-device change history.
  • Investigate software compliance questions by classifying and filtering software.
  • Prepare audit exports or feed external systems through built-in reports, grid exports, the REST API, or Alloy Navigator Sync.
  • Onboard a new tenant in a multi-tenant install through the Site model.
  • Retire stale or idle devices through Inventory pruning.

Who AlloyScan is for

AlloyScan supports several audiences:

  • System administrators keep an authoritative inventory and respond to unauthorised changes.
  • IT asset managers track software installations, license compliance, and stale devices.
  • Network engineers discover SNMP devices and review per-switch topology.
  • Help desk and support engineers look up a device, inspect its current state, and run remote tools.
  • Compliance and security officers review the security posture, the Change log, and the audit trail.
  • Site administrators manage a single tenant on a multi-tenant install.
  • Global administrators configure the instance — sites, email transport, manufacturer registry, license, multi-site reports.
  • External integrators consume inventory programmatically through App registrations and the REST API.

For each role you sign in with either email and password, Microsoft SSO, or Google SSO when configured. Two roles ship out of the box: Administrator (full site-scope access) and User (read-oriented, with the ability to start scans and audits, assign existing schedules, and apply existing tags).

How the pieces fit together

AlloyScan has a small number of components that work together:

Audit Service

The Audit Service is a lightweight Windows service that you install inside your network. It performs agentless scan and audit of reachable devices over WMI/WinRM, SSH, SNMP, and ESXi or Hyper-V APIs. The Audit Service holds an encrypted credentials pool with seven credential types: Windows, Linux and macOS, Hypervisor, SNMP, AWS, Azure, and Google. Credentials are stored locally and never leave the local network.

You install one or more Audit Services depending on the segments and reachability you need to cover. To learn how, see Discovery and Audit.

Audit Agents

An Audit Agent is a lightweight service installed on an individual endpoint — Windows, macOS, or Linux. Agents push audit data back to AlloyScan over outbound HTTPS on TCP port 443 only, which makes them the right fit for laptops, remote workers, and any endpoint that does not stay on your internal network.

To install your first agent, follow the agent deployment tutorial.

Inventory

Discovered and audited devices accumulate into the Inventory for each Site. The Inventory is organised hierarchically by device type — Computers (Windows, macOS, Linux), Hypervisors, Hosted hypervisors, SNMP devices, and Cloud resources. Each device has its own form with four tabs: General, Details, Audit, and Change history. SNMP printers add a Printer supplies tab.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is the site landing page. It presents fifteen fixed widgets covering the site health, audit freshness, hardware aging, security posture, Windows 11 migration readiness, and similar at-a-glance views. Click on a slice or counter to drill into the corresponding pre-filtered Inventory grid.

Sites

A Site is a tenant within an instance. Each Site has its own slug (for example agent in /agent/...), time zone, users, segments, inventory, schedules, reports, and logs. One AlloyScan instance can host many Sites — the test instance behind this documentation hosts 78 — which makes the platform suitable for managed service providers and other multi-tenant deployments.

Admin Center

The Admin Center is the administration area, split into two tabs:

  • Site Settings — current-site administration: IAM, settings, customisation, tasks and services, notifications, logs, limits and usage.
  • App management — instance-global administration: Sites, Email client, Site template defaults, IAM, Resources (Manufacturers), Multi-site reports, global logs.

Users with a single scope see only the tab they have access to.

Where AlloyScan fits next to similar products

AlloyScan competes with other network inventory and IT asset discovery tools. What sets it apart:

  • A central Audit Service with an encrypted credentials pool covering seven types.
  • First-class multi-tenancy with many Sites per instance.
  • A two-tier retention model — device pruning, change retention, and optional snapshot offload to S3-compatible storage.
  • An embedded report designer, so you do not need an external BI tool to author reports.
  • Multi-site reports for managed service providers.
  • Fourteen built-in remote tools plus custom PowerShell.
  • A dedicated AlloyScan-to-Alloy-Navigator sync.
  • Preview cloud coverage for AWS, Azure, and Google through the same Segment abstraction.

Note: AlloyScan audits state, not traffic. It is not a real-time network monitor, a patch-management system, a software-deployment pipeline, a vulnerability scanner, or a full CMDB. It feeds those systems through the API and through Alloy Navigator Sync.

Where to go next