Managing Your Assets
The ability to manage IT software licenses or inventory items, from procurement to disposal is one of the foremost business requirements of IT departments.
ASM Core Asset Management is a cohesive solution enabling IT departments to manage all lifecycle phases of software products and track inventory quantities, and also monitor the over or under utilization of software licenses.
Asset management also integrates with other areas of the application such as IPK and Workflow, enabling analysts to perform asset management transactions, such as order, purchase, allocate, reserve and retire, from calls, requests and tasks. The ability to manage licenses and inventory items through transactions is set through an analyst’s configuration security role.
ASM Core provides four CMDB types for asset management:
ASM Core also allows you to set up an CMDB Item Type as an asset. This allows you to search on those CMDB items flagged as assets. However, to fully utilize asset management (transactions, thresholds, and usage criteria) you must use the Software Products for the Finance department and record this order in the CMDB.
In the case of manual asset management, the Analyst:
adds the new inventory record, Keyboard
adds a new transaction entry for the order. The Item Summary on the Keyboard Details automatically indicates 25 keyboards are on order.
The Analyst can later allocate the keyboards to each person in the finance department, which will again automatically calculate the Item Summary on the Keyboard Details indicating the number of keyboards in use.
In an automated scenario, the Analyst makes the order through a new request, set up with the appropriate tasks. Thus, a workflow can automate the process by triggering tasks to request permission for the purchase from managers, notify external suppliers, and ultimately create the new Keyboard item in the CMDB.
Managing assets through transactions, thresholds and usage criteria
Quantities of software licenses or inventory items can also be managed through transactions. You can execute a transaction to order, purchase, allocate, reserve, transfer, and retire a quantity of licenses or inventory items. When you execute one of these transactions, you move a particular quantity of the licenses or inventory items from one state (or pool) to another. These pools can be on order, on-hand (available), on-hand (unavailable), or in use. After executing a transaction, the item summary on the license or inventory details window is automatically recalculated, allowing you to see at a glance the number of items on order, reserved or in use.
You can also specify a threshold for a software license or inventory item, to raise a call or request if you need restock or buy more licenses.
You can define the usage criteria for a software license or inventory item to specify the CMDB items to/for which the license or inventory can be allocated or reserved, for instance if an inventory item must only be used with a particular hardware model.