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Hardware Inventory/ Software Asset Management

In organisations that have a large distributed enterprise, it is often an impossible task to keep track of all of the IP enabled IT assets.

In some cases a significant number of a company’s IP enabled IT assets could be undocumented and not appear in any inventory databases or asset list, it is hard enough to keep track of all the assets that you do know about let alone find all the assets that you don’t know about.

For all systems that have TEM agents installed on them detailed hardware and software asset data is discovered through the agent.

Key Features

  • Core Tivoli Infrastructure Management
  • Agent management
  • Unmanaged server reports
  • Inventory and Asset Reporting
    • Memory and Partition usage
    • Network information
    • Hardware information
    • Application information
    • Operating system information

TEM provides hardware and software inventory, it collects natively installed software and hardware information and makes it available through console or Web Report interface. Executable scan data and software usage analysis also available.

The following screenshot shows the inventory data that is collected.

The following is an example of the Operating system information

The following is an example of the Operating system information

Asset Discovery

The TaaS asset discovery solution offers several ways to identify them:

  • TEM Client Deploy Tool: A tool that will connect to Active Directory and check if the computers have the TEM Client service running. The TEM Client Deploy Tool comes installed when you install the TEM Installation Generator. The TEM Client Deploy Tool can also be used to install the TEM Client if the computers are in the Active Directory domain.
  • TEM Asset Discovery Fixlet Site: A Fixlet site that allows you to remotely deploy "Scan Points" to periodically scan the remote subnets and then import the data into the BigFix Console.

The TEM Asset Discovery Fixlet site allows you to help find unmanaged computers that do not have the TEM Client installed (or computers that do not have the TEM Client running) that are on the network and additionally help you identify network devices such as routers, printers, and switches that cannot have the TEM Client installed.

TEM Asset Discovery works by allowing you through Fixlet messages and Tasks to deploy "Scan Points", which are NMAP scanners, to specified TEM Clients in your network. You can then use Fixlets and Tasks to periodically run scans. The scan results are automatically transferred to the TEM Server, which imports the data into the database. The scan information can then be viewed in the TEM Console in the "Unmanaged Asset" tab.

The TEM asset discovery function provides the ability to deploy scan points to clients on designated subnets and to schedule scans for unmanaged assets. The following diagram shows a simplified version of the discovery of an unmanaged asset.

 

The agent-less scanning has the ability to detect operating systems, services running on open ports.