The increasing importance of Asset and Inventory Management in IT organizations   IT environments today are growing in size and complexity, which in turn often calls for expensive hardware and software purchases and upgrades. At the same time, licensing requirements regarding the use of software are becoming increasingly confusing. Affected companies should always keep in mind that changes to the IT environment must in no way interfere with full compliance with mandatory regulations (such as data protection regulations). Consequently, this increases the demands placed on reliable IT Asset and Inventory Management.

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The Asset and Inventory Management module of theGuard! Service Management Center is a redeveloped version of an ITIL-based solution for the management of IT assets and inventory data in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The most distinguishing features of the Asset and Inventory Management module are its flexibility in granularity, its ability to process data from multiple sources such as manually entered data or information obtained by the discovery feature of theGuard! NetworkManager, and its integration with various inventory tools. The CMDB is a central database that holds all relevant information on your IT operations.
The modules of theGuard! Service Management Center use this database as a basis to link their data with asset and inventory information, thus paving the way for comprehensive analysis.
When combined with the Configuration Management module, such an ITIL-compliant CMDB can be defined on the basis of the database. 

 

When combined with Configuration Management, asset and inventory data form the basis for defining an ITIL-compliant CMDB. Data is maintained in a structured form based on CIs (Configuration Items). From a technical point of view, these are managed objects with their corresponding properties. Incoming data is normalized in order to ensure comparability between different data sources. The interrelations between objects are predefined to some extent and/or can be added by the user.

It is possible to specify desired configurations on the basis of Configuration Items and to check them against the current status. Deviations, which could also cause problems, can thus be quickly and reliably detected. It is also possible to log the change history. A change history can be created for a group, object, or a property of an object. Changes to certain objects can only be made by means of a Change Management process and/or an authorization. These objects can be tagged so that unconfirmed changes become immediately visible or are reported to an administrator using a ticket.