Last time, we talked about the need to have a reconciliation process in order to accurately arrive at a comprehensive view of inventory. But we need to go further than that.

In Part 6, let’s talk about what we call “Asset Telemetry.”

Today’s IT environments are extremely dynamic with systems being retired regularly, new systems coming online, systems becoming stale, employees joining, leaving, changing teams, etc., so performing a continuous asset inventory is a critical need in our environments. 

The concept of Asset Telemetry captures the changes in overall inventory, as well as how specific attributes change within a specific asset. This enables us to leverage the inventory data in a broader set of use cases: as an example, by tracking asset telemetry, we enable the asset inventory system to effectively support incident response investigations. 

Generally, one of the first questions in an investigation is identifying the asset or device associated with a specific IP address. And without a continuous record of the asset telemetry – not just snapshots of points in time – it becomes difficult to easily identify what asset was tied to a specific IP address at a specific point in time.

So now we’ve discussed how one might go about building an automated, continuous asset inventory that reconciles assets across systems, as well as why it’s essential for that system to capture and reconcile not just numbers of devices, but continuous records of the state of each device. 

Next, we’ll discuss the impact that this information can have for an organization.