Best Practices for Tracking Assets

When you manage assets, we recommend the following best practices:

Enter useful information for cost, productivity, and decision making.
If you cannot think of an immediate need, reconsider tracking the information.
Keep the information accurate and up-to-date. If the information becomes outdated and obsolete, you do not know what information to trust. As a result, you can make incorrect purchasing and business decisions.
Track expensive products and key components (such as system units, mainframes, large devices, printers, and monitors) as assets. Do not maintain information about IT assets that are not important when making purchasing and business decisions.
Track a product as an asset only if you want to know the detailed information (such as the cost, serial number, bar code number, location) about each instance of that product. For example, if you want to know the location of each monitor of a particular model being used, or the cost of each monitor of a model.
If you are using a discovery product to track the usage of hardware or software products, consider the following information:
- The discovery product, instead of CA APM, tracks the product types.
- The product types that the discovery product and CA APM must track support a comparison of usage and ownership information.