Asset Discovery

Asset discovery is the process of finding all IT and business assets in your organization. The result of asset discovery is a list of all assets across your organization, which is updated whenever assets are added, removed, or modified from your IT and business environment. This list includes IT assets such as servers, databases, applications, computers, and mobile devices, plus business assets including contracts, purchase orders, licenses, and even furniture and users.

Having a complete and up-to-date picture of your technology landscape is an important reason to collect this type of data, allowing IT to make smarter decisions to move the business forward.

It’s possible to manually keep a record of all the assets on your network. However, even under the best circumstances, this leaves a lot of opportunity for error. If you have a medium or large-sized organization, manual asset discovery becomes nearly impossible and very unreliable. To effectively discover assets in every corner of your organization, you need to turn to an automated asset discovery software that incorporates best practices, like SolarWinds Discovery, which has tight integration with SolarWinds Service Desk.

An asset tracking software system lets you discover, track, and manage all the assets in your IT and business environment. It’s designed to allow quick, easy access to all the important information about your assets whenever you need it.

Asset tracking systems can be as simple as just a pen and paper approach, but this method has very few benefits. Not only can it leave you scrambling to find the written record of assets when you need it, but it’s also a time-consuming process and requires an individual to note any new asset additions and keep these records organized and clear.

A slightly better asset tracking system is the spreadsheet-based method. The biggest benefits of spreadsheets over pen and paper is that they’re digitally accessible and multiple users can view and contribute to them. However, these spreadsheets can be prone to error and lead to misrepresentations of your available assets.

The best type of asset tracking system is dedicated software that can perform automated discovery across your organization and keep these assets up-to-date in case any assets are added, removed, or modified in your IT and business environment.

Asset tracking requires a comprehensive approach to asset discovery and management. Your IT assets have lifecycles, from deployment to de-provisioning, and you need to track their health across those lifecycles.

The first step in asset tracking is discovery. You want to make sure you have an accurate overview of all your assets. When new assets are added—or old assets dropped—you need to make sure you have instant visibility into those changes.

Once you have those assets in your system, you should maintain awareness of their status. Are assets nearing the end of their lifecycle? Have any assets been modified? Are there IT service management items such as incidents, problems, changes, and releases associated with assets? Tracking asset status requires a centralized view with real-time visibility into your entire asset inventory.