30. 06. 2025
Asset Management, Unified Monitoring
29. 09. 2025
Mirko Morandini
Asset Management, GLPI, Knowledge Management, Service Management
Getting the M(u)st out of GLPI
TLTR1: Did you pick all the sweet grapes that grew in your vineyard? They’re sweet, but they degrade faster than you think. Now, to give them long-lasting value, get the must out of it and put a lot of knowledge, time and effort to create a high-value wine!
TLTR2: Do you have an automatically fed asset inventory? That’s nice to show off, like sweet grapes, but to get real, long-lasting value out of your asset inventory, you also need to continuously put a lot of effort into it!
You’re probably here because you have an asset management system, such as GLPI, up and running. The GLPI Agent is installed on many laptops, servers and VMs, and maybe you have already read my previous blogs and configured the SNMP scan to gather switches, access points and printers. Good, that’s perfect for a demo to your boss, or in front of some auditor.
You may also gain some interesting insights, but when you start digging into the details, and as time passes, you quickly see that it’s not enough: there’s no way around putting some manual effort into it.
The two most important points for reliable asset management are the following:
- What’s the status of your assets? An automatic inventory can’t understand this! Was the laptop retired or stolen, or is its owner just at home a few months, on maternity leave or for other reasons? Is the VM still running in test or production, should it be powered off, or is it already deleted?
- And are you sure that your asset inventory is complete? In some cases an agent can’t be installed, or it can’t communicate. VMs might be sprouting outside of your control, old workstations are being reactivated, and SNMP devices can be missing for many reasons.
These two points must be addressed with diligent manual work, by combining and analyzing data from different sources.
On the way to becoming the master data source for your IT, you’ll need to gather several additional types of data in your asset management system:
- Ownership and contracts
- Owner and technician in chargePhysical location, group or department ownershipContracts, warranties and licenses
- Suppliers, supplier contacts and support times
- Asset interrelations
- Network
- Services, clusters
- Datacenters and racks
- Additional data
- For accounting purposes
- For system management and monitoring
- For other automations
- Knowledge base
- Documentation of servers, applications, IT services
- Documentation of IT-internal processes, security constraints, etc.
- Additional documents
- FAQs for the IT support teams and for the end users
As a comprehensive ITSM system, GLPI also integrates an ITIL-compliant service desk, with a customer help desk, and incident-, request-, problem-, and change management. In particular, in this article I’d like to stress the importance of change management as part of complete asset management. Requests for change (RfCs) are the means for documenting the decision-making process behind a critical asset change, and thus respond to the questions “Why is it like this?” and “Who authorized this and takes responsibility for it?”.
An asset management system that gathers all this information should not only be the central reference for the service desk team, but for everyone in IT – from applications to monitoring, from purchasing to security. It will be the starting point for any incident or security analysis, and the basis for ISO27001 and NIS2 compliance.
To achieve this, try to involve all IT personnel and key users, and designate someone to be in charge of the timeliness and completeness of the data. Be prepared: this is not work that a nerdy admin can do in their spare time, but the benefits in all areas of IT management will soon outweigh the initial effort. Don’t stop at picking the sweet grapes – take the must out of it and keep putting in effort until you create an exceptional wine of high value!
Mirko Morandini
Mirko Morandini, PhD, is part of the EriZone team since 2015. As a consultant, he guided the implementation of EriZone in various projects in the DACH area and in Italy.
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