Cairn documentation — Snipe-IT reconciliation setup

Cairn keeps your IT asset system of record matching reality. It reads device inventory from the MDM and EDR tools that already manage your fleet, reconciles overlapping records, and writes one clean, trustworthy record per machine — so you stop guessing what you actually own.

Cairn matches records for the same physical machine across tools by serial number, then merges them field-by-field using the trust score you assign each source. Higher trust wins on conflict, so (for example) you can let Jamf own hardware fields while CrowdStrike owns last-seen data.

Sources include Jamf Pro, Microsoft Intune, Kandji, JumpCloud, Google Workspace (ChromeOS), CrowdStrike Falcon, Sophos Central, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Apple Business Manager, UniFi, CDW, and Rudder. Snipe-IT is the supported system of record, and notifications go to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a generic webhook.

There's nothing to import manually — Cairn pulls live device data directly from your connected sources on every run. Your reconciled records live in your Snipe-IT system of record, which you fully own and can export at any time through Snipe-IT's own API and CSV export.

No. Run cairn sync --dry-run to preview every create, update, and conflict resolution before a single write hits your system of record. Only when you drop the flag does Cairn apply changes.

Cairn talks to each tool with its own scoped API credentials — ideally read-only on sources and write-scoped only on your system of record. Secrets are supplied via environment variables (never committed to config), connections are HTTPS-only, config files are permission-checked, and serial numbers are masked in logs.

Every run produces a summary of matched, new, and conflict-resolved devices, delivered to your notification channel. You can search and filter the reconciled records themselves in Snipe-IT by serial, asset tag, model, or source.

Cairn is a single cross-platform binary for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Run it in fleet mode centrally to reconcile the whole estate, or in agent mode on each endpoint to sync that one machine. It fits cleanly into cron jobs and CI/orchestration pipelines.

Yes. Cairn is free and open source, released under the AGPL-3.0 — the same license as Snipe-IT, which Cairn integrates with. You can self-host it at no cost, forever, from GitHub. There are no paid tiers, no seat limits, and no license keys.

Nothing. Cairn is free and open source (AGPL-3.0), forever. There are no paid tiers, no seat limits, and no license keys — see the pricing page.

Cairn's provider model lets new MDM and EDR sources be added without changing the core engine. Since Cairn is open source, you can build a provider yourself or request one on GitHub.