Service Manager powered by HEAT

Working with Inventory Management

•About Inventory Management

•Inventory Audit Features

About Inventory Management

Inventory management is the discovery and auditing of assets or configuration items used within an organization to ensure that they appear in the configuration management database. The CI workspace maintains information about the assets required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships. See also About Configuration Management.

You can create a configuration item record by importing information about assets or by manually creating a record. However, without a way to discover whether the assets are connected, you cannot keep the information about them current or updated.

ISM Discovery, a component of Ivanti Service Manager, automatically detects network-attached devices such as computers, servers, printers, and switches. After the system has discovered these devices and created a configuration item record for them, the devices are audited to collect detailed information for each discovered device. For example, for a computer, the audit gathers information about the hardware, operating system, application software, and data files. Client agents communicate with the server agent through an efficient and compressed protocol, with negligible impact on network performance. In addition, you can use HEAT DSM to install or update software. See Working with HEAT DSM.

ISM Discovery Managers have the required permissions and views to perform all the inventory auditing tasks.

Inventory Audit Features

Inventory auditing provides the following features:

•Asset tracking through the comprehensive auditing of networked computers, standalone computers, and servers, for hardware and software applications.

•Simple, flexible, rapid deployment across your network without disrupting users.

•Software usage. This can tell you whether to move an application from a computer on which it is installed but not used, to another computer (thereby saving the expense of a new license).

•History by reauditing. Auditing can be carried out according to a schedule and on demand.

•Ability to track and manage mobile devices.

•Flexible reports and queries of audit information.

•Ability to display the audit information in a number of ways including by:

•Organizational unit to reflect your company structure

•Software product

•Operating system

•Device type