Why a CMDB populated only from your service management tool will always be incomplete, and what changes when asset and licensing data feeds it directly.
First published in October 2017, revised in December 2019, and revised again on migration.
Do you spend more time than you should trying to find the information you need? Is that slowing down your responses to IT and service desk queries?
There is a common misconception that IT service management and the service desk are the same thing. ITSM has a much broader scope, covering a range of IT management capabilities across service delivery and support, with the service desk forming one part of it. To manage ITSM processes and service desk issues properly, access to IT data is critical — it is what improves fix times and efficiency. But there are real limits on getting at that information.
Service desk teams understand better than anyone how much depends on having complete and accurate information to hand. That is what makes data in ITSM, and in the configuration management database, so important: it is where teams find what they need to resolve issues, and to prevent them.
Some organisations rely solely on their ITSM platform to populate the CMDB. Given the sheer volume of data required, that creates several problems:
High impact on resources. Populating and maintaining data from numerous sources is slow, and it never finishes.
Accuracy of data. Where data is not managed dynamically, its accuracy depends on people remembering to maintain it. They do not.
Wasted effort. A large amount of time goes into extracting and manipulating data to produce reports that are already out of date when they are circulated.
There is a fourth problem that barely existed when this article was first written. A CMDB populated from a service management platform records the things that platform knows about — devices with a ticket history, and the software installed on them. It does not record the SaaS applications someone bought on a card, the cloud resources spun up by a deployment pipeline, or the AI tools that arrived last quarter. Those are now a large share of what IT is responsible for, and they are invisible to a device-shaped configuration record.
Integrating IT asset management with ITSM matters because it is what lets you understand what you actually own — a significant benefit for IT managers, ITSM managers and service desk staff alike.
The integration makes the specific hardware and software attributes of configuration items — computers, printers, switches, routers — readily available to everyone who needs them. Having detailed hardware and software inventory to hand improves efficiency and productivity, and strengthens the processes ITSM defines: request fulfilment, software deployment, change management and more.
The 2017 version of this article used operating system migration as its example, on the grounds that ITAM supplies the metrics accurate project management requires. That example has become concrete. CerteroX ITAM orchestrates Windows 11 upgrades directly, distributes MSI, EXE and Click-to-Run packages, drives SCCM applications, packages and jobs through the SCCM interface, and handles WSUS-integrated patching with downstream server support. The migration project is not just reported on from the asset platform — it is run from it.
With one central record of device and software information, organisations improve ITSM processes and cut the load on service desk teams.
If the goal is a complete view rather than a complete device list, the configuration record needs more than hardware and installed software:
That is the difference between a CMDB that describes your managed devices and one that describes your organisation.
Through the OData protocol, the read-only Certero API provides granular data from any CerteroX product in JSON, so your team can share and manipulate asset data to populate ITSM platforms, CMDBs, Excel, Power BI and anything else that consumes a REST endpoint. There is a documented Power BI data source for exactly this purpose.
The API is read-only by design. The asset platform is the source of truth for what exists; the ITSM platform remains the source of truth for process. Neither should be quietly rewriting the other’s records.
Alongside the API, CerteroX ITAM ships 28 named system connectors, including Active Directory, SCCM, Intune, WSUS and the major hypervisors, and CerteroX SaaS Management includes a ServiceNow connector for provisioning, deprovisioning and role management.
Book a demo to see the ten discovery methods resolve to one asset record a CMDB can trust.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Asset management either accelerates a change programme or quietly holds it up. The difference is whether your data is accurate on demand — and what your tools make you do by hand to get it.
Hybrid IT broke the ITAM tools built for the data centre. What unified discovery, software recognition and governance actually have to cover when your assets span on-premises, virtual, cloud and SaaS — and how to test a vendor against it.
Two of the things that most reliably sink an audit defence — an entitlement record you cannot reconstruct, and the assumption that moving to the cloud removed the problem.
Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.