Asset Management on ESM Guide

Choosing an ITSM platform: the criteria grid

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In short:

Six criteria genuinely separate ITSM platforms, and functional richness is not among them.

On core processes, incident, request and change, every serious platform performs alike.

The billing unit, technician or end user, weighs more on five-year cost than any single feature.

The service catalogue is written before the consultation, not after: it is what makes demos comparable.

What to settle before looking at any tool

Most tenders start with a feature grid sent to vendors. That is the reverse of the order that produces a good decision. Until scope is written down, every vendor answers on its own ground and the answers are not comparable.

Automated IT inventory: the methods compared

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In short:

Three collection methods coexist: agent, agentless, network discovery by scanning.

The agent returns the most complete software inventory and works outside the corporate network.

Network discovery is the only method that detects unmanageable equipment.

A real estate almost always combines all three, at different collection frequencies by device type.

Why manual inventory does not hold

An IT estate moves constantly: workstations replaced, software installed on user initiative, virtual machines created then forgotten. A manually maintained IT inventory is wrong the day it is published. The question is therefore not whether to automate, but by which method.

CMDB: what it is for and how to feed it

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In short:

A CMDB records configuration items and, above all, the dependency relationships linking them.

Its primary use is impact analysis, before a change or during a major incident.

An inventory lists assets, a CMDB adds dependencies: they are two different objects.

Manual population always drifts: automated collection is the only sustainable option.

What a CMDB actually contains

A CMDB, for Configuration Management Database, records the configuration items of an information system: servers, workstations, applications, services, contracts. But the list is not the point. What separates a CMDB from a spreadsheet is the relationships between those items: which server hosts which database, which database feeds which application, which application delivers which business service.