Practical Network Scanning

Network operating system inventory – trace your infrastructure 

As a system administrator, it is very important to know what is running on your network and there are multiple tools available for creating an inventory. An inventory can help you to determine operating system's end-of-life, licensing cost, budgeting, and patch management. Most importantly, it gives you the visibility and analysis of the OS running on your infrastructure. The only similarity between system administrators and attackers is that they both use a similar set of methods for fixing or exploiting a system. System administrators need to run a scan and fix problems before an attacker exploits any vulnerabilities found.