New: Duplicate assets and inventory scavenging

Today’s modern IT infrastructure is dynamic and rapidly changing, and a typical computer inventory is constantly evolving: new computers are acquired and provisioned, old computers are disposed, employees are hired (need a new computer) or terminated (need to reformat and reassign their old computer) and external parties are granted access to your network. Assets are being sent to repair and maintenance and aging computers are disposed. Even the increasing popularity of virtualization is bringing new complexities to asset management (Virtual Machines are easily created, launched, terminated and disposed, and many customers are debating whether they should track them as part of asset management).

Your IT Asset Management system should be flexible enough and accommodate for your infrastructure changes so that you can stay on top of your inventory and know the status of your assets. That’s why we are introducing a couple of new features that makes it easier to manage your dynamic asset inventory:

Scavenging - provides the ability to remove obsolete duplicate computers from your inventory. Since there is no automatic way to define an obsolete asset we have added a new “duplicate” view under the Workstation Inventory section, and included a number of filters such as “by Mac Address”, “Mac Address & Computer name” and a couple of other to help you seek for scavenging opportunities in your inventory. Simply use the view to go through the duplicate entries listed and remove old assets from the inventory. When you select an asset for removal, the asset status will change to “duplicate” or “disposed” based on your selection.

Disposing - when you dispose old assets or no longer wish to track an existing asset (for example, you no longer wish to track your Virtual Machines or Network Attached Storage), simply mark the asset as “disposed” (under workstation -> asset status change to “dispose”).

When an asset is marked as duplicate or disposed it is excluded from your summary reports, dashboards and your asset counts. SAManage will no longer scan that asset for risks or correlate the software installed on that asset against your licensing records. However, for audit purposes and to provide for an easy way to “undo” your disposals, you can still find all your previously disposed and duplicate assets by going to the Workstation Inventory -> “view by Asset Status” and using a filter to view duplicates or disposed assets.

As always, please let us know what you think and ideas to improve. Happy scavenging.

Related posts:

1. How to Deal with Duplicate IT Assets in your inventory
2. Asset classifications and new ways to account for your IT assets
3. IT Inventory Management with SAManage
4. New: Better Inventory Control, Improved Risk Management
5. Resolving the Problem of Duplicate Computers