Is a CMDB enough for IT asset management, or do you need a separate system?

A CMDB is enough to know what your IT infrastructure is made of and what an outage will affect. But it won't tell you who is responsible for a laptop, what is sitting in the warehouse, how much an asset has cost over its lifetime, and when it is due for replacement. Those are IT asset management (ITAM) questions. If your team looks for the answers in Excel and email threads, you already need dedicated asset tracking.

How a CMDB differs from IT asset management

A configuration management database (CMDB) stores configuration items (CIs) and the relationships between them: a server, the service running on it, and the users of that service. It is used to investigate incidents and assess the risk of changes.

IT asset management looks at the same hardware as property. It cares about:

• the lifecycle, from the initial need and purchase to write-off;
• the person responsible for the asset and the warehouse it is kept in;
• the contract and warranty;
• the total cost over the asset's lifetime.

These procedures are described in the ISO/IEC 19770-1 standard. How it is applied in the product is shown in the SimpleOne ITAM documentation.

The difference is easy to see in how ITGLOBAL.COM set up SimpleOne ITAM: "Conceptually, an asset and a configuration unit are two different entities. There can be a configuration unit without an asset or an asset without a configuration unit."

Five questions a CMDB and Excel can't answer

1. Who is accountable for this laptop if it goes missing?
2. How much hardware is in the warehouse, and can it be issued instead of buying new?
3. What has the asset cost over its lifetime: purchase, repairs, upgrades?
4. When do the warranty and useful life end?
5. Does the physical inventory match the records, and where are the discrepancies?

The cost of answering "we don't know" is unnecessary and rush purchases, plus hardware whose loss is discovered only during an infrequent audit. Where these losses come from is covered in the SimpleOne blog article The IT Budget's Black Hole. How to explain this spending to finance is covered in the answer "How do you explain IT budget growth to your CFO?".

Before moving to SimpleOne ITAM, ITGLOBAL.COM, an international system integrator and cloud provider, kept asset records in Excel files. Several employees could not work with a file at the same time, international purchases and equipment movements were hard to monitor, and inventory and cost analytics could not be obtained quickly.

Why a separate system must not become a second set of records

Asset tracking that isn't linked to the CMDB leaves you with two databases holding different data. When choosing a system, check two things:

• an asset and a configuration item are linked, and one can be created from the other;
• work on hardware runs as tasks created from the same requests and changes as in ITSM.

How it works in SimpleOne ITAM

SimpleOne ITAM is an IT asset management system that runs on the same platform as SimpleOne ITSM:

• an asset's stage, status, responsible person, and stock change only through tasks, from registration and issue to write-off and disposal;
• the asset record holds the cost center, total costs, useful life, and warranty;
• an asset can be created from a CMDB configuration item and vice versa;
• requests and changes in ITSM are linked to ITAM tasks.

At ITGLOBAL.COM, SimpleOne ITAM covers asset accounting at sites in 12 countries. Assets are linked to cost centers, every warehouse has responsible persons, and selected asset categories are linked to the CMDB through SimpleOne ITSM, so the asset form shows the configuration item and the incidents it is involved in.

See which processes the system covers on the SimpleOne ITAM page.