Importing IT asset management data
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With Control Desk, you can integrate information about IT assets from external databases and repositories. To facilitate integration, Control Desk includes components and applications that you can use to import data. Regularly scheduled imports provide up-to-date information about your IT hardware, software, and software licenses and enable effective IT asset management. |
Control Desk includes applications within the product that facilitate data imports as well as an integration component, Integration Composer, that you can use to import data.
Integration framework in Control Desk
The integration framework is a set of applications in the Integration module in Control Desk. These applications facilitate two-way data exchange between Control Desk and external applications in real time or batch mode. Through the integration framework, you can exchange data synchronously and asynchronously by using a variety of communication protocols.
- The software catalog provided by IBM. Data is displayed in the Software Catalog application.
- The software catalog maintained in IBM® Tivoli® Asset Discovery for z/OS®. Data that you import is displayed in the Software Catalog application.
- Data about how you disposed of IT assets when they reached the end of their useful life cycle. This feature is useful if you have large numbers of assets to dispose of and you use the services of an external vendor.
Integration Composer
The component Integration Composer is an integration tool that imports hardware and software inventory data from external databases into the Maximo® database tables for deployed assets and configuration items. You can use this tool to import data collected by discovery tools such as IBM Tivoli Asset Discovery for Distributed and IBM Tivoli Asset Discovery for z/OS. These discovery tools scan computers, network devices, and network printers deployed in an enterprise and record information about the hardware and software installed on those assets. Integration Composer transforms the collected data and imports it into Control Desk.
Control Desk provides integration adapters that facilitate data imports for commonly used discovery tools. Each integration adapter provided with Integration Composer specifies how to transform and import data for a specific discovery tool. You also can create and customize integration adapter mappings to meet your specific migration requirements. To keep data current, you can schedule imports to occur on a regular basis using the scheduling applications in Control Desk or another scheduler such as Windows scheduler.
In addition, if you are installing Control Desk for the first time, you can use Integration Composer to create a baseline of IT assets from data collected by your discovery tool.
Preparing for integration
Control Desk supports many deployment options. Before you define and implement import schedules, review your product configuration to determine the kinds of imports required and to plan schedules for importing data.