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IT Asset Management

Use this playbook to establish Cloudaware as a practical asset management layer for cloud, virtualized, on-premises, and third-party systems. The goal is not only to list assets, but to make assets usable for operations, reporting, security triage, cost analysis, and audits.

Solution Scope​

IT asset management in Cloudaware starts with CMDB. CMDB stores discovered configuration items (CIs), relationships, ownership fields, lifecycle state, and configuration history. Advanced Analytics can then use that data for inventory dashboards, KPIs, exports, and management reporting.

Use this solution when you need to:

  • Build a trusted inventory across cloud accounts, subscriptions, projects, data centers, and connected tools.
  • Normalize asset ownership, application, environment, and business metadata.
  • Track relationships between resources, such as instances, volumes, networks, accounts, applications, and owners.
  • Identify inventory gaps, stale assets, duplicate records, or unmanaged resources.
  • Provide reusable asset context to security, operations, compliance, and FinOps workflows.

Module Fit​

ModuleRole in the solution
CMDBStores assets, relationships, ownership, lifecycle state, history, and custom attributes.
Advanced AnalyticsBuilds dashboards, KPIs, exports, and management views from CMDB data.

Other modules consume the same asset model. For example, Vulnerability Management uses CMDB ownership and application context to route findings, Cost Management uses it for allocation, and Change Management uses it to record and review CI changes.

Workflow​

  1. Define asset scope. Decide which providers, accounts, subscriptions, projects, regions, on-premises environments, and third-party systems are in scope. Separate production, non-production, customer, and shared-service scopes where reporting or access control differs.

  2. Connect data sources. Configure the required integrations and verify that Cloudaware is collecting the expected object types. Use CMDB ingestion and integration status pages to confirm that collection jobs are healthy.

  3. Validate inventory coverage. Compare CMDB counts with provider consoles or existing inventories for key CI classes, such as compute, storage, network, databases, identities, Kubernetes objects, and endpoint records. Save list views for missing, inactive, or unexpectedly unmanaged assets.

  4. Normalize ownership and classification. Standardize fields such as owner, application, environment, business unit, cost center, lifecycle state, and criticality. Use CMDB customization and enrichment rules where provider tags or source attributes need to be mapped into common fields.

  5. Model relationships. Review parent-child and dependency relationships for the assets that matter operationally. Prioritize relationships used for impact analysis, such as application-to-resource, host-to-volume, instance-to-network, and resource-to-account relationships.

  6. Build reusable views and reports. Create list views, reports, and dashboards for common questions: what exists, who owns it, where it runs, whether it is active, whether metadata is complete, and whether required controls are attached.

  7. Operationalize data quality. Schedule recurring reviews for stale records, missing ownership, unsupported regions, unmanaged accounts, and integration failures. Treat these as asset data quality issues, not one-time cleanup tasks.

Expected Outputs​

  • A CMDB-backed inventory with validated provider and integration coverage.
  • Standardized ownership, application, environment, and lifecycle fields.
  • Saved views for missing metadata, stale records, unmanaged assets, and high-value asset classes.
  • Dashboards for asset counts, growth, coverage, and data quality.
  • A reusable asset context layer for security, compliance, operations, and cost workflows.