Asset management provides the following system management functions that help you to manage assets in the most complex IT environments. The robust management database (MDB) can identify and deploy the agents to all the IT assets in your network environment using the built-in deployment wizard.
After the agents are deployed, you can perform the following tasks on the computer assets:
Detects and reports detailed inventory information such as serial numbers of the hard disks, CPU information, RAM, internal and peripheral disk drives, OS versions and service packs, network settings, and power settings.
Hardware inventory is collected based on the inventory detection modules configured on the agents.
These modules let you do the following:
Detects the software applications, regular or virtual, installed on the managed assets and reports detailed and accurate information. Asset management can collect the software inventory using one of the following methods:
Scans the agent computers using the signature database. The signature database with predefined signatures packaged with asset management gives you (IT administrators) a quick overview of which applications are installed where, right after installation. You can also create software signatures for the software specific to your business and download new and updated signatures over the internet from a central CA maintained database. By default, these updated signatures are automatically downloaded once a day by the Default Software Contents Download job.
An Intellisig is a script that detects software installed on agent computers. Intellisigs provide the most flexible and accurate way to detect software compared to the heuristic and software signature scanning. Intellisigs extract the software definition information from a defined source that the software manufacturer provides. The source can be a text file, database, registry, or binary file. For example, dsmver –f <output file> is the command that outputs version information about CA ITCM. Unless the manufacturer changes the way version information is stored for the product, Intellisigs can detect the future versions of the product also.
Scans the Windows Add or Remove Program database, MSI database, and shortcuts in the desktop and Start menu for the installed applications. On Linux/UNIX agents, heuristic scanning is performed on the PIF, PKG, and RPM databases.
Specifies the process priorities for the signature scan and the asset management agent. This helps in minimizing the hard drive load during the signature scan.
Note: Polite scan can be configured on Linux or UNIX systems only. On Windows agents, by default, polite scan is optimized to minimum impact with fast execution and minimum CPU time.
Software Usage Monitoring allows control over the usage of a specific application. The software usage agent can do the following:
The general inventory module also scans the network configuration such as the TCP/IPv4, TCP/IPv6, WINS, and DNS configuration on the managed assets.
You can query the database for specific information that you need. You can query the job or collect task status and search for inventories or assets matching specified criteria. You can also create a policy based on a query.
Asset management manages the assets connected to it by enforcing certain policies. These policies let you focus on critical data when certain threshold values are exceeded. You can create query-based and event-based policies and specify the action that needs to be taken when a policy is violated or the event has occurred. You can take advantage of the predefined event-based policies as well.
The Asset Collector collects the hardware and software inventory information from well-formed inventory files. You can also track the origin and trustworthiness of this inventory. Using the Asset Collector, you can create inventory information for various sources such as proprietary devices that are not currently supported by CA Client Automation, Mainframe computers, and so on.
The CA Asset Converter for Microsoft® SCCM is a component that connects to a Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and extracts information, including hardware and software inventory, about the computers stored in its database.
The virtual host inventory feature collects and reports inventory data on virtual hosts from a Client Automation agent on a remote machine.
The Non Resident Inventory (NRI) solution provides a simple way to inventory a system without having to deploy the Client Automation agent to it.
Asset management uses the DSM Reporter for creating various asset-related reports. These reports help in taking management decisions. Using the Query Designer, you can evaluate the data and specify the fields to be shown in the reports. You can print these reports or export to another application such as a CSV file or HTML file.
You can generate the reports manually at any time or schedule them to be generated at a specific time using the DSM Reporter GUI. The system engine generates the scheduled reports at the specified time.
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