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:

Item Type	To ...
Software Products	Manage the number of software licenses purchased by your organization to comply with license usage agreements and use all available licenses optimally. You can create, say, a software product record "Outlook", to manage the licenses owned by your company for this product.
Inventory	Manage bulk quantities of items in your stock through a single Inventory record. Instead of adding 200 separate keyboard items to the CMDB, you can add an inventory, Keyboard, and track the quantities of the items on the one inventory.
Packages	Manage deployments of multiple licenses by adding a package and then linking particular versions of the license to the package. This could be used for a departmental security upgrade consisting of multiple software products.
Structures	Enable items within the CMDB to be grouped together for easier searching and referencing. A structure is a special type of CMDB entity. It does not represent an actual piece of hardware, software or documentation, but it used to point to a collection of related CMDB items. Structures can also be used to refer to physical locations such as server rooms, or conceptual groups such as printers.

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:

1. adds the new inventory record, Keyboard

2. adds a new transaction entry for the order. The Item Summary on the Keyboard Details automatically indicates 25 keyboards are on order.

3. 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.