IT Inventory Management and Asset Tracking for Server Hardware and Software

IT inventory or asset management is a set of practices focused on tracking and managing business hardware and software, including related service level agreements (SLAs) and other contractual concerns. Optimizing the way you manage inventory lists can help you more efficiently support lifecycle management for your device, service, and software inventory—which can play a significant role in increasing the effectiveness and extending the lifecycle of your IT assets.

Using an IT asset tracking tool with hardware warranty expiration monitoring capabilities can help you ensure future purchases and procurement strategies are aligned with departmental goals and business needs.

IT inventory software streamlines asset management processes which enables you to correlate, track, and analyze changes to ensure optimal service and performance. This provides visibility into how physical assets like hardware, servers, and other devices can be directly tied to purchase orders, service level contracts, software applications, services, and other intangible assets. It enables you to look up the hardware and software associated with each workstation and device, while also helping to increase the traceability of your assets.

Inventory tracking tools offer an efficient means of tracking and analyzing system rosters, as well as the location, use, cost, add and expiration dates, and other business-relevant information for individual assets and components. Understanding the infrastructural relationships between assets can allow you to more effectively manage your inventory over the course of its lifecycle and reduce unnecessary expenses at the same time. This can lead to simpler auditing and reporting processes, as well, which can be useful for insurance purposes and tracking inventory depreciation.

In a digital world where efficiency is increasingly key to success, IT inventory management software is essential. These tools can help eliminate the need for making time-consuming manual updates to cumbersome spreadsheets after each incident or ownership update. IT inventory software makes it easier to track your assets by allowing you to create detailed records about each of your assets, document maintenance timelines, and update assignments and location—all from a single convenient web platform.

The best way to automate inventory discovery is through using appropriate software. Manually tracking and managing IT assets over the course of their lifecycles is time-consuming and inefficient.

Automated inventory management tools can help to minimize the opportunities for manual mistakes and significantly increase the efficiency of management practices, which is especially important as your server hardware and software inventory grow. A tool that automates necessary low-value operations such as inventory discovery becomes critical as the scope of business operations change and IT departments are tasked with provisioning resources to support the new infrastructure and setup.

For example, the Asset Inventory feature in SolarWinds SPCB is designed to simplify the process of inventory management, while still providing a wealth of detailed information. The asset auto-discovery tool, for instance, can provide services for physical assets and virtual network nodes, including:

• Tracking warranty and expiration data for business-critical hardware
• Alerting admins when firmware, operating system, and software updates become available
• Recording when server inventory operating system updates were deployed
• Monitoring the maintenance needs and lifecycles of devices and hardware

Once your server agents have been downloaded and properly configured, you can run Discovery in SAM (a tool included in the Server Performance & Configuration Bundle) to automatically detect the agents and begin polling nodes immediately. Polling jobs repeat each day and can be rescheduled to run at different frequencies or during specific time periods to limit overtaxing CPU usage and ensure the load on polling engines is kept manageable. By default, Asset Inventory also monitors the health of hardware assets—a capability you can use independently of polling as needed.

Remember proactive monitoring solutions become essential as infrastructures increase in size and complexity. It’s not enough to only monitor the health and performance of your hardware and applications—you also need inventory management tools that can allow you to automatically discover new network components and keep your inventory current. Additionally, automated database server inventory tools, software inventory tools, and hardware tracking tools—when used in tandem with application monitoring software—can allow you to more easily access the configuration specs for different assets and components when troubleshooting infrastructural issues. Hardware warranty expiration monitoring tools are likewise useful for determining when to phase out outdated devices or software. SolarWinds SPCB is designed to provide the key features of these tools in one bundled solution.

The inventory management tools included in SPCB can enable you to poll individual nodes or groups of nodes, allowing you to maintain a current server inventory with ease.

Once the third-party agent software has been installed and configured, enabling Asset Inventory in bulk is as simple as running another Discovery. This will essentially “rediscover” the nodes and begin polling, without impacting currently monitored infrastructural components.

The server inventory tools will likewise poll nodes daily to keep assets lists current. The use of dedicated tools in SPCB can allow you to more easily and accurately maintain current inventory without using archaic methods, such as validating the inventory list in sheets or analogue form.

SPCB automatically scans your networked environment for new assets. As new servers join the Orion^® Platform, it’s designed to automatically determine if the new devices match one of the more than 1,200 monitoring templates included in Server & Application Monitor. You can also leverage more than 1,000 community-created SAM monitoring templates or create your own.

A list of servers can be accessed under My Dashboards on the Summary page in Orion Control Panel. The Candidates for Server Configuration Monitoring server inventory widget displays both agentless nodes eligible for configuration and hardware warranty expiration monitoring, and which monitoring profiles would make the best fit. The integrated IT asset tracking tool in SPCB also allows you to push agents to these nodes, assign relevant hardware or software inventory profiles and preconfigured monitoring profiles, or dismiss the nodes as options.

An IT inventory tracker like SPCB makes it easier to monitor multitude of changes made across systems—the solution can automatically log configuration modifications for both your software inventory and server inventory and sends alerts about changes made in hardware and software configurations. This also enables you to leverage SPCB as a database server inventory tool, as the software can monitor database infrastructure for changes in user permissions.

Once the inventory management tools in SAM and SCM (the products included in the SPCB bundle) are enabled and you run a Discovery, the Server Configuration Summary dashboard populates recent configurations and changes. From here, you can examine configuration changes made to your monitored network nodes during specific time periods and compare the most recent configuration versions for differences using SolarWinds SCM. A visually intuitive system of color coding can help you keep an eye on specific changes types, which is useful when trying to identify anomalous or unauthorized activity.

In SolarWinds SPCB, the Asset Inventory feature in SAM is the home for all things related to managing IT inventory. From here, you can use the inventory management software to maintain an accurate and detailed accounting of your assets. The automatic data collection function of the Asset Inventory is especially useful for tracking asset depreciation or collecting insurance information—SAM helps you connect the dots between your IT infrastructure needs and your company’s bottom line. Monitoring maintenance timelines for signs of wear and tear can also help you plan more precise and effective provisioning strategies.

Once you enable Asset Inventory data collection capabilities, the inventory tracking tool can be scheduled to automatically create and send different types of reports on your hardware and software assets. To generate an asset inventory report from the Orion web console, select the Reports tab and click All Reports. This will display all available report types SAM can provide. Reports can also be automated to generate at regular intervals, in response to performance metrics that reach critical benchmarks, and delivered to key players and stakeholders at specified frequencies.