Managing Hardware Assets › Hardware Reconciliation

Hardware Reconciliation

The hardware reconciliation process matches discovered assets to corresponding owned assets from different logical repositories so that you can manage the assets based on your business practices. Use this process to identify the discrepancies between your owned and discovered assets. Hardware reconciliation identifies unauthorized, missing, under-utilized, and over-utilized assets, which helps you to optimize your hardware asset base.

• Owned assets provide IT asset information from a financial and ownership perspective. The product supports the entire lifecycle of an owned asset from procurement, acquisition, allocation, use, and disposal, including legal and cost information. Owned assets have purchase records, including a purchase order number, invoice number, associated costs (lease, payment schedule, maintenance), associated contracts (terms and conditions), and vendor information. The owned-asset data is entered and imported using the CA APM user interface, Administration tab, Data Importer.
• Discovered assets provide information about the assets that an enterprise is using or has deployed. External discovery products and the discovery component of CA Client Automation scan the assets on a network and store them as discovered assets in the CA MDB. Discovered assets contain evidence about the following information:
  • The asset is deployed and can be found on your network.
  • The asset is being used and has metrics.
  • The asset contains up-to-date configuration information for inventory.

The CA APM hardware reconciliation process matches the discovered asset data and the owned asset data that are stored in the CA MDB. The hardware reconciliation process may detect assets that cannot be reconciled with any of your owned assets. You can decide to add the unreconciled assets to your repository so that you can track and manage all assets in your network.

Hardware reconciliation automates the synchronization of ownership and discovered data. Hardware reconciliation supports the discovery component of CA Client Automation and third-party discovery products. These components and products are supported through the combination of the CA Asset Converter and the asset collector component of CA Client Automation. When CA SAM is installed, discovery connectors load the discovery data into the CA SAM repository. The discovery data is then synchronized with CA APM.