Hardware and software inventory

Every managed endpoint reports its hardware profile and installed software to the platform. Hardware inventory includes manufacturer, model and serial; software inventory tracks installed applications and their versions. Warranty information is collected where it is available.

The value of collected inventory over maintained inventory is that it does not decay. An asset spreadsheet is accurate on the day it is written and progressively less so every day after, because keeping it current depends on people doing an administrative task with no immediate reward. Agent-collected inventory reflects what is actually on the machine, whether or not anyone remembered to record a change.

This turns several expensive questions into cheap ones. Which machines are still running a version of an application with a known vulnerability. Which serial numbers are covered by the warranty batch a vendor just issued a notice about. How many machines are old enough to justify the refresh budget you are requesting. Each of those is a report rather than a fortnight of asking people to check.

Software inventory is also the substance of a licence conversation. Reconciling what is installed against what is entitled is how you find both directions of drift — the seats you are paying for and nobody is using, and the installs that exceed what you bought. The second is the one that becomes a problem during a vendor audit.

Inventory has a natural latency. It reflects the last successful collection, so a machine that has been offline for a fortnight is telling you what it looked like a fortnight ago. That is usually fine and occasionally misleading; when a machine matters to a decision, check when it last reported before quoting what it contains.