Creating a baseline set of IT assets
When you first implement Control Desk, you can create an initial set of IT asset records in the database. This is done by using the data that an asset discovery tool collected and that you imported into the deployed assets tables.
To help you manage IT asset information, Control Desk maintains
two distinct kinds of data about IT assets: authorized asset data
and deployed asset data.
- Authorized IT asset information is data that you record in Control Desk about what you acquired and installed. This data represents your authorized inventory, what you expect to have in your inventory based on what you planned, purchased, and received.
- Deployed asset data is information that a discovery tool collects about equipment deployed in your enterprise. To gather this data, discovery tools (such as Tivoli® Asset Discovery for z/OS® or Tivoli Asset Discovery for Distributed) scan computers, network devices, and network printers deployed in your enterprise and record information about the hardware and software installed on those assets. The data that the discovery tools collect is imported into the database using an integration tool such as Integration Composer.
The IT asset initialization process lets you use deployed asset
data that you imported into the Maximo® database to
create authorized IT asset records in the Assets table in the database. Using
deployed asset data to create IT asset records is an efficient way
to create a baseline set of IT asset records when you first implement IT
asset management. To create a baseline set of IT asset data, you perform
the following tasks:
- Collect data from devices installed on your network using a discovery tool, such as Asset Discovery for Distributed.
- Import data from the discovery tool database into Deployed Assets using the appropriate Integration Composer adapter.
- Migrate data from Deployed Assets into Assets using the IT asset initialization components with Integration Composer.
The asset initialization process is designed only to establish an initial baseline of authorized IT asset data by leveraging data collected from deployed assets. Use the IT asset initialization process only to create new IT assets. Do not use the process to update existing assets. You cannot use this process for configuration items or other kinds of data.