Asset Management

Reference: Asset Management

Overview

Every asset has a lifecycle from purchase to retirement. The Cireson Asset Management product directly integrates with Microsoft Service Manager to enhance Microsoft System Center, Server, and Cloud’s powerful capabilities. It provides Asset Managers an effective lifecycle view revealing precisely where a particular asset is at any given moment, and whether or not it’s providing value to your business.

With Cireson Asset Management you can track all your IT asset details from the asset status, location, department, cost center, owner, warranty, maintenance, and software licensing to gain control on your true IT operational costs. Common efficiency gains include planning asset offerings, fulfilling procurement and retirement requests, automating deployments, office replenishment's, standardizations, and managing incidents and changes all within Service Manager.

The Cireson Asset Management product consists of three individual products that together provide customers with the tools required to assist in creating an outstanding asset management solution. 

  1. The core product for the Cireson Asset Management solution is the asset management classes that are added to the SCSM product. To assist in updating asset classes, the other two applications allow asset administrators to update the configuration items easily and quickly. 
  2. Asset Excel allows asset administrators to bulk enter and edit asset records within the common and well known interface of Microsoft Excel. 
  3. Asset Import allows for the creation of connectors within SCSM that can import, on a schedule, or on demand, data from known data sources. 

The Cireson Asset Management solution utilizes client information discovered by System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) to populate, maintain, update and delete Configuration Items (CI’s) and properties of CI’s within SCSM.

Related Articles

KB2519 - Reference: Asset Management

KB2520 - User Guide: Installing Asset Management

KB2521 - User Guide: Configuring Asset Management

KB2522 - How To: Asset Management Environment Permissions - Master User Role

KB2523 - User Guide: Asset Management Lists

KB2526 - User Guide: Upgrading Asset Management

KB2527 - User Guide: Optimizing Asset Management Intelligence

KB2528 - How To: Configuring Software Metering in Configuration Manager

KB2531 - How To: Configuring User Device Affinity in Configuration Manager

KB19 - Install: Asset Excel

KB2533 - User Guide: Configuring and Using Asset Excel

Features

  • Structure and manage all hardware, software, virtual, mobile, and non-IT assets across their lifecycle from purchase to retirement within a single interface in Service Manager
  • Software Asset Management (SAM) allows you to track, evaluate and manage software licenses and usage seamlessly with the rest of your ITSM and governance processes
  • Track, enforce, and manage support & maintenance, warranty, or lease contracts via built-in SLA engine
  • Enhance vendor management by analyzing asset performance
  • Gain location to IP awareness for complete hardware asset insight
  • Manage purchased software assets against installation vs. utilization, upgrades & downgrades, CPU physical and virtual, OS installation or names license management
  • Store financial information, purchase orders, and invoices to help understand your true asset costs
  • Keep data fresh with scheduled data imports. Take advantage of native built-in Microsoft System Center connectors, CSV file mapping, and other 3rd party sources via direct SQL server access
  • Simplify asset management with product wildcarding and increase efficiency with software normalization
  • Gain insight through comprehensive reporting based on asset data from the data warehouse and cube reporting engine within Service Manager

Basics (from Config Manager to Cireson Asset Management)

For a more detailed run through of the Cireson Asset Management solution you can read a three part blog series by Wally Mead here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Configuration Manager's asset management capabilities begin with three unique processes:

  • Discovery of the hardware asset
  • Getting the hardware asset into a managed state
  • Managing the asset

After you’ve accomplished these three steps (which are comprised of many additional individual steps not covered in this article) you can utilize the features of Configuration Manager to perform the native asset management functions.

Discovery of the Hardware Asset

The entire process begins with discovery of your hardware assets – you can’t manage what you don’t know about. AD System Discovery is generally considered the most effective Configuration Manager discovery method to use, however Network Discovery has its place (workgroup clients, network equipment, Macs, Linux/UNIX, etc.). 

The screenshot above shows the properties of a discovered asset in the Config Manager database.

Discovery of software assets come as part of the third process in the list – managing the asset

Limitations of Configuration Manager in terms of Asset Management

As great of a product technology that Configuration Manager is and in spite of it many terrific capabilities, it is very much lacking when you try to use it for asset management. Configuration Manager was never designed as a complete asset management solution, rather it was designed to allow you to manage your assets, and even there, primarily your Windows-based computers (although as already mentioned, there is management of non-Windows platforms).

Configuration Manager has some great building blocks for providing very valuable information that an asset manager would want. It just doesn’t provide the full management capabilities that the asset manager needs, which is where Cireson Asset Management shines when managing the assets in a manner that they need to.

Getting the Hardware Asset into a Managed State

Once you have discovered the hardware asset (which technically you do not have to discover systems before you manage them, although the majority of the time you do initiate one of Configuration Manager’s built-in discovery processes to find systems either from Active Directory or throughout your network), there are a couple of ways to “get devices into a managed state for Configuration Manager”.

Here we will talk about the primary method of doing this: Configuration Manager Client. By installing this tool on each managed computer, server or device, Configuration manager will be able to retrieve a lot of information about those devices which can then be synced into System Center Service Manager through the use of a Config Manager Connector. 

You can also get information about assets by using an AD Connector pointing at your Computer OU

Managing the Asset

Now that you have a managed hardware asset, there are some basic capabilities available in the context of asset management. These include:

  • Associating users to their primary devices – this is very useful in terms of application management. There are numerous methods to associate users to devices in Configuration Manager.
  • Hardware inventory – this is key to identifying the hardware attributes of devices, as well as the software applications that are installed on those devices.
    • When enabled, additional software application discovery data can be reported through hardware inventory with a Configuration Manager feature called Asset Intelligence. This feature is a software identification system that uses numerous discovery features to identify software installed, which is compared to a built-on database of around 200,000 unique applications. This feature can provide additional installed application data for Windows client and server systems running the Configuration Manager client agent.
  • Software inventory – while it sounds like something you’d want, realistically, you probably don’t even need to use this feature. Determination of the software that is installed on a device actually occurs via hardware inventory for all devices. As a result, you likely won’t even use the software inventory feature, and by default, in Configuration Manager 2012, there are no default software inventory scan rules.
  • Software metering – this Configuration Manager feature identifies the usage of software on Windows client and server systems with the Configuration Manager client agent installed. This can help you determine, when tied together with the hardware inventory capabilities of identifying application installations, whether or not you have purchased too many, or too few, licenses for your software applications.

Configuration Manager has many other features that is provides for managing both full Configuration Manager clients such as application (software) deployment, operating system deployment, software update management, compliance settings, client health, and so on (note that not all features are available for all types of managed devices).

What Next?

Once your assets are in a managed state and are ready to be tracked, monitored and reported on, we can move them in to Service Manager and refine the usefulness of the information that has been acquired. The screenshot above shows a Windows Computer that has been imported using the Config Manager/AD Connector. Details have been imported directly from the asset that was originally discovered.

Cireson Hardware Assets can be created from Configuration Manager data. That’s certainly one method of creating hardware assets – extracting the base information from a source, such as Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, or Active Directory. From here, the Configuration Manager connector can initially create the Windows Computers within Service Manager. This includes Configuration Manager specific data, such as the primary user, hardware inventory details, and so on that was extracted from Configuration Manager (although the Active Directory as well as Operations Manager connectors could also initially create the Windows Computers), and inserted them into the Service Manager central management database (CMDB).

From there, the Hardware Asset Update Workflow created hardware assets from the data in the CMDB created by the Configuration Manager connector. The end result was that we had Hardware Assets created in the Asset Management node, which happened to be created out of Configuration Manager source information.

What about Data that is not tracked in Configuration Manager?

Much of Asset Management is about displaying item costs, packages, warranties and more. Most of this information is not tracked in Configuration Manager, so it's important to create this information manually. 

This information can be the financial, contractual, business or technical data you wish to associate with your assets, or the actual hardware and software assets themselves. It’s really easy to manually create asset data, simply right-click on the asset class you want to create data for, and choose the “Create item” option, where “item” reflects the asset data class you are working with.

Once this data is created, it can then be associated with each different Asset Management class and can be utliized for reporting, tracking and management of devices and assets. 

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