IT assets under vigilant control

The growth of the business of any company in most cases entails the expansion and complication of its IT infrastructure. In a crisis, customers are forced to count money and optimize costs wherever possible, including in the field of budgets allocated to information technology. So that the management of corporate IT does not turn into chaos, but is clear and well-coordinated, allowing the business not only not to spend too much, but also make a profit, you need tools to account for and manage IT assets. They will automate all the processes of the life cycle of IT assets: procurement, commissioning, maintenance and repair, modernization and decommissioning.



Thanks to IT asset management systems, companies gain a number of advantages, including transparency and predictability of IT costs, reduction and optimization of software and hardware costs, the ability to plan for upgrading and expanding IT resources, justify IT costs, and calculate payback and profitability of existing IT assets. There are many similar systems on the market today.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise also offers a range of IT asset management solutions to customers. Many already know the HPE Asset Manager, which has recently been updated to version 9.50, as well as the Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) for configuration management.
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The receipt of data in UCMDB is implemented in various ways: by integrating with Asset Manager and other systems or by using automatic filling when scanning network devices (PCs, printers, storage systems, servers, NAS, etc.) and software (infrastructure software, operating systems) auxiliary and business applications). Inside UCMDB, the resulting data is classified according to certain policies, and then it goes to Asset Manager or other systems for further processing.

The basic concept of UCMDB is “configuration unit”. It can be any piece of equipment or a separate application. For example, for a processor, a single computing core can serve as a configuration unit. Accordingly, a single IT asset may include multiple configuration items. In turn, Asset Manager uses the concept of "IT asset". One such asset is a set of configuration units. If necessary, you can see the entire structure of configuration units that comprise it.

As a result of integrating UCMDB with Asset Manager, the customer receives a comprehensive solution that allows you to manage both configurations and IT assets. This makes it possible to see the whole "picture" entirely in a mode close to the real one.

Take, for example, such a task as inventory of IT resources. In the absence of IT asset and configuration management, this inventory is a routine process. This is usually manual data entry into an Excel spreadsheet. Conduct inventory no more than once every six months, or even once a year. In between, with an IT asset, anything can happen: it can be moved to another place, stolen or thrown away due to a breakdown. At the same time in the tables there is a record of it. The use of configuration management systems in integration with the IT asset management system allows you to avoid such problems. It is enough to start the process of detecting existing IT assets on any day, and then compare its results with the existing ones in order to understand what changes have occurred.

Additional features of UCMDB even allow real-time detection of the absence of a device or software product.

An IT asset management system is not a “thing in itself.” It can be integrated with ITSM solutions — for example, with HPE Service Manager from Hewlett Packard Enterprise or with third-party products.

Another class of solutions that can be integrated with IT asset management and configuration systems is IT infrastructure monitoring products. In order to set up a monitoring system, you need to decide what it will cover with its “attention”. To do this, and need an inventory. As a rule, monitoring systems use their own configuration database called the Runtime Service Model (RTSM). Unlike UCMDB, in which you can enter any data on any configuration units, and not just those that are currently connected to the network, the RTSM covers only those systems that are included in the perimeter of the monitoring system. Of course, UCMDB and RTSM are able to communicate with each other. The frequency of such an exchange can be set by the customer.

What are the benefits of this integration? So, when receiving a request for any problems through ServiceDesk, IT specialists fully see the entire service-resource model of the enterprise in a tree-like format. This makes it possible to quickly get to the root cause of the incident and eliminate it. This model allows you to create IT services in design mode, that is, to combine a pool of resources into a single service.

Often, customers purchase Asset Manager along with Service Manager, but without UCMDB, because a lightweight version of UCMDB is supplied with both products for free, which contains all the same features except for automatic filling by detecting configuration units in the network. The entire filling process takes place either manually or through integration with the Asset Manager.

One of the new directions in IT asset management is Software Asset Management (software asset management). Such functionality in HPE Asset Manager is supported by an additional module that relates the number of software assets to the number of licenses purchased. Of course, we are talking about the support of various types of licensing.

Recognizing batch numbers, Asset Manager verifies information about the availability of licenses and the number of rights that they provide, with data on the real state of the software used in the company. Of course, ideal cases, when the number of purchased licenses for software products corresponds to the number of actually installed and used ones, is quite rare. Deviations are more often observed both upwards and downwards. In cases where purchased licenses are much more used by the company, Asset Manager can help re-distribute them. Thus, the customer will save a significant amount of money. This is especially useful for companies and holdings, in which there are separate units that are not related to each other.

HPE Asset Manager has a modular structure, which includes a basic system and a number of modules, free or purchased separately. The basic functionality of the basic system includes portfolio management of assets (Portfolio Management) with their detailed description (affiliation, date of inventory, key financial indicators and current location). Additional modules provide financial management, procurement, contracts, as well as accounting software, as already mentioned above. With the help of Asset Manager, you can implement not-so-ordinary projects - for example, to create a supplier database on the basis of the procurement module that allows you to analyze not only prices, but also many other parameters of each supplier, as well as receive statistics on working with him.

In conclusion, I would like to note that the capabilities of Asset Manager far exceed the management of only IT assets alone. The solution also allows you to take into account any objects and equipment (buildings, individual floors, engineering systems, cars, etc.). And thanks to the wide integration capabilities, Asset Manager and UCMDB can work not only with each other, but also with third-party solutions.