End-to-end asset management
BMC offers complete lifecycle management of IT assets. Leverage BMC's asset management solution for complete asset lifecycle management and compliance, from procurement to retirement of your IT assets. Easily deploy and monitor your assets using the available integrations with multiple applications and processes. Automate asset discovery and relationship mapping through service models. In addition, track each asset's value and make informed decisions on asset upgrades and replacements.
The Asset Management solution capabilities help you achieve the following business goals:
- Effectively manage the entire asset lifecycle through all the stages of the asset's useful life.
- Automate mundane tasks in your IT environment.
- Automate compliance processes and track software usage.
- Get comprehensive audit trails to help your line of business avoid costly penalties and mitigate compliance risks.
- Leverage out-of-the-box workflows to automatically populate and update your asset data for faster resolution of ITSM tickets.
Asset lifecycle overview
The asset lifecycle begins with planning and procuring the asset before it becomes a part of the IT infrastructure and ends with retiring it. The following image shows a high-level overview of the different stages in asset lifecycle:
Review the following key stages of the asset lifecycle to effectively manage your IT infrastructure:
Plan and procure assets
An Asset Manager plans for the following actions:
- Add new assets to the IT environment.
- Replace assets that have reached the end of their useful life.
- Fulfill asset requisitions that were created in BMC Helix Digital workplace by end users.
Manage asset and service requests
End users use BMC Helix Digital Workplace, a self-service platform, to browse the entire list of assets and services and make a request according to their requirements. The assets are populated into BMC Helix Digital Workplace from Asset management through different asset groups. For more information about connecting Asset Management and BMC Helix Digital Workplace, see Configuring services and assets to be available on the My Stuff page.
Based on the plan to add new assets to the IT infrastructure, the Asset Manager decides to either purchase new assets or procure them on lease from a vendor. In an enterprise, when you receive different assets, you want to make sure that the assets reach the right end user and are also tracked to monitor the asset health for as long as it is in use.
Deploy and maintain assets
The newly procured assets are deployed to the IT environment and made available for use. These assets are regularly monitored for asset health, security, and compliance.
The following image gives an overview of the asset workflow after the assets are deployed to the IT environment:
Asset discovery
After assets are deployed to your IT environment, asset discovery tools scan these assets and reconcile their information.
Different discovery providers scan and discover assets from the IT environment, reconcile the asset information, build relationships, and transfer it to CMDB. For example, see the following discovery tools:
- BMC Helix Discovery discovers CI types such as servers, virtual machines, containers, software, storage systems, and network devices.
- BMC Client Management discovers CI types such as computer systems, processors, operating systems, and software products.
- Microsoft SCCM discovers Microsoft and Windows-based applications.
Service modeling
BMC Helix Discovery is a data center discovery solution to automate the discovery of data center inventory, configuration, and relationship data and map the applications to the IT infrastructure. By mapping relationships between assets and their dependencies, BMC Helix Discovery creates service models.
These service models help quickly visualize the assets, their dependencies, and service impacts. Leverage the ready-to-use templates in Blueprints to create service models. Blueprints are rules-based and visually map out the steps that make up a service process as shown in the image. This makes it simpler to design a new service or improve an existing service. For more information, see Service modeling with blueprints.
For learning about the key concepts in BMC Helix Discovery, see Getting started with BMC Helix Discovery.
For integrating other discovery providers, see Integrating discovery providers with BMC Helix CMDB.
Asset validation
Asset management focuses on tracking and maintaining a company's physical or digital assets throughout the assets' lifecycle, while configuration management focuses on capturing and maintaining information about these assets.
Every configuration item that needs to be managed to deliver an IT service is contained in your CMDB.
By utilizing BMC Helix CMDB, organizations can ensure that every configuration item recorded and managed aligns seamlessly with their asset management practices.
BMC Helix CMDB provides a complete, accurate, and up-to-date view of the people, processes, and technologies that make up your business and IT environments.
CMDB integrates with other discovery providers such as BMC Client Management and Microsoft SCCM by using the Atrium Integrator and CMDB APIs.
CMDB normalizes and reconciles these assets by using the Product Catalog, and the reconciliation rules. Then, the assets are pushed into the production dataset and are considered fit for consumption by other applications. This asset data is used by ITSM applications such as Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management.
This data is also used by BMC Helix Operations Management applications for efficient service management and problem remediation through BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
For information about normalization and reconciliation, see Managing consistency of CMDB data by using normalization and Merging duplicate CIs by reconciling data from multiple sources .
For more information about BMC Helix CMDB and best practices, see Getting started with BMC Helix CMDB .
Out-of-the box reports for CMDB data
Use BMC Helix Dashboards to get a summary of the CMDB data. For example, you can view the total number of CIs in different datasets and classes, the trend of CIs created in a selected time period, duplicate CIs, orphan CIs, and data quality metrics.
For automated out-of-the-box data integrity reports about the CI data in CMDB, see BMC Helix CMDB dashboards .
Asset tracking and management
CMDB processes the CIs and moves them to the production dataset or the BMC Asset dataset that is consumed by the Asset Management application. You can also create assets manually in this application. These assets go through the defined data integrity and validation processes before they are used as assets in Asset Management.
Single source of asset data
Asset managers, administrators, and users can access these assets through the Asset Management application. The asset data is also used by service and operations management applications such as Incident management, Change management, and AIOps.
Asset tasks automation
Instead of manually updating the details of assets, use asset automations to automatically create the people and data relationships, update the asset location, move the asset through the asset lifecycle stages, and so on. By automating these mundane tasks, you can significantly reduce the time and resources required to track and maintain the assets. For information about setting rules for asset automation, see Automating tasks by using Asset Automation.
Out-of-the box reports for asset data
As an Asset Manager, get insights about the health of your assets in your IT environment through out-of-the-box reports. Gain insights such as the number of unassigned assets, number of refreshed assets, number of scanned assets, the distribution details of these assets, count of assets that are nearing the end of life or end of support dates, or outdated assets that must be reviewed for compliance. You can customize these reports according to your requirements.
For more information about BMC Helix Dashboards, see BMC Helix ITSM Asset dashboards.
Review contracts and retire assets
When an asset reaches the end of its useful life, it is retired from the IT environment. The Asset Manager makes the decision about renewing and replacing the retired assets. Therefore, asset management is a continuous and ongoing exercise that is critical to your IT infrastructure.
For learning more about the key concepts in Asset Management, see Getting started with Asset Management.
Monitor the health of your IT assets
During the asset lifecycle maintenance phase, as an IT operator, continuously monitor the health of the assets and take prompt action when issues are detected. Leverage BMC Helix solutions, which offer seamless integration and automation, from asset discovery to maintenance and monitoring.
For a comprehensive understanding of these capabilities and their benefits, see Getting started with BMC Helix AIOps.
Where to go from here
Task | Reference |
|---|---|
Understand the key concepts, components, and architecture of BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management. | |
Perform the initial tasks required to configure the different components in BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management. |