A guide to IT asset and service configuration management
Before you start, this guide covers:
What asset and service configuration management means for IT infrastructure and Operations, including the service side of asset management.
The scope of asset and service configuration management: Why managing the full lifecycle of hardware, software, and cloud assets is critical for IT infrastructure and operations.
Strategic visibility: How connecting assets, configuration data, and service context reduces operational risk and speeds up incident resolution.
Building a service-centric CMDB: How to use Assets and hardware asset management (HAM) templates to create a relational database for your IT environment.
Operational trust: Using Assets Data Manager to reconcile fragmented data from discovery tools and spreadsheets into a single source of truth.
Practical walkthrough: A step-by-step example of managing IT requests with full operational visibility and automation.
Service Collection products referenced: Jira Service Management, Assets, Customer Service Collection, Rovo
Reading time: 10 minutes
Master IT asset and service configuration management with better service context
IT and operations teams depend on accurate and reliable asset data, clear service context, and automated workflows to keep the business running. That’s why IT asset and service configuration management is critical for IT infrastructure, operations, and service desk teams: it connects hardware, software, services, owners, and dependencies, enabling teams to understand business impact, respond to incidents faster, reduce operational risk, and make informed decisions.
When this information is scattered across spreadsheets and disconnected tools, teams lose time, miss risk signals, and struggle to respond quickly.
Asset and service configuration management brings these pieces together for IT and operations teams. With Service Collection’s apps, Assets and Jira Service Management, teams can track assets and service configuration items and connect them to any work, such as requests, incidents, changes, projects, tasks, and more. This is critical to understand how services are supported and use automation to keep work moving with the right context.
What is IT asset and service configuration management?
IT asset and service configuration management (a combination of service asset management and configuration management) is the process responsible for ensuring that the assets required to deliver services are properly controlled and that accurate, reliable information about those assets is available when and where it is needed.
More specifically, the process has two linked purposes:
Service asset management: accounts for and manages the lifecycle of service assets (configuration items) with financial value or that need to be tracked, from acquisition through disposal.
Configuration management: maintains information about configuration items (CIs), the components required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships and dependencies, recorded in a configuration management system (CMS) / configuration management database (CMDB).
Asset management is the practice of managing support, change, and operational workflows using trusted data about assets, configuration items, and the services they support.
Atlassian's goal for Assets is to create a single, accurate view of these items: what they are, where they are, who uses them, how they're configured, how much they cost, and how they change over time. With that view, teams make better decisions and lower cost and risk.
What is IT asset management?
IT asset management (ITAM) is the set of business practices that integrates financial, contractual, and inventory functions to manage the entire lifecycle of IT assets, from procurement to disposal. It ensures IT resources are used efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively, covering both hardware and software.
IT asset management (ITAM) is the umbrella term that includes hardware asset management (HAM), software asset management (SAM), and related data such as contracts, vendors, and sometimes services.
When people say IT asset management (ITAM), they usually mean IT-focused asset oversight, commonly split into HAM and SAM, with the same goal: to understand and control assets to maximize value while minimizing cost and risk.
Including other non-IT resources - procurement, facilities, security, contracts - lets you consolidate the company’s services onto one system.
You can think of HAM and SAM as the muscles; ITAM is the nervous system that coordinates them across the business.
More formally, asset management typically includes:
Identifying assets (creating and maintaining an inventory or CMDB/asset register).
Tracking the lifecycle of each asset from data request → purchase → deployment → moves/changes → repair → retirement/disposal.
Making sure assets are used efficiently (avoiding shelfware, duplicate tools, unassigned devices, and over- or under-licensing).
Managing financial aspects like depreciation, renewals, warranties, and contract terms.
Reducing risk by knowing what’s in your environment for security, compliance, and audit purposes.
Together, these practices create a centralized, operational record of an organization's IT environment, commonly known as a configuration management database (CMDB). Unlike a flat list in a spreadsheet, a CMDB tracks an organization's assets, or configuration items (CIs), and their relationships, showing how hardware, software, and services depend on one another to support business operations.
A CMDB can include CIs such as hardware, software, licenses, applications, cloud resources, contracts, locations, vendors, employees, and business services, and link the relationships among them.
It is the difference between knowing you own a server and understanding which business services depend on it, who supports it, what changed recently, and what breaks if it fails.
Assets gives teams working in Jira Service Management a flexible data management and asset repository that can be connected directly to service workflows.
Atlassian's structural advantage
Our asset management system isn't a standalone IT asset or data management tool. It's natively embedded in Atlassian's platform and Teamwork Graph, connected to the tools IT, Ops, and business teams already use, surfacing asset context exactly where it's needed, when it's needed. Because Atlassian's Teamwork Graph is natively powering AI across the platform, Assets becomes more than just a tracking tool; it's the trusted data foundation that makes AI actionable, and your AI is only as good as the data it runs on.
Why IT asset management matters for infrastructure, operations, and service desks
Service desk and operations teams need more than a shared list or systems with devices as their IT asset management solution. They need a usable single system of record that supports day-to-day work and decision-making.
Effective ITAM helps eliminate shadow IT by providing visibility into all unauthorized software and hardware.
Resolve requests faster: Agents can see the device, software, service, owner, and prior issues connected to a request.
Improve incident response: Teams can quickly identify affected services, supporting infrastructure, and likely owners during an outage.
Reduce operational risk: Improved configuration visibility helps teams assess the impact of changes before making updates.
Strengthen lifecycle management: Teams can track inventory, usage, warranty status, ownership, end-of-life, and asset state in one place.
Create a more reliable source of truth: Assets Data Manager helps ingest, transform, cleanse, normalize, reconcile, and maintain trustworthy data across multiple systems, ensuring your data is complete, current, and correct.
Support audit and compliance needs: Teams can maintain clearer records of what assets exist, how they are used, and what services they support.
Optimize costs: Use accurate asset data to identify underused hardware and software, reduce unnecessary purchases and renewals, and make better lifecycle decisions.
How Assets and Jira Service Management support asset-centric operations
Service Collection’s Assets and Jira Service Management help IT infrastructure and operations teams connect work with the underlying assets and configuration items that matter.
Instead of treating asset data as a separate administrative task, teams can bring it directly into support, operations workflows, and beyond, including managing any type of asset or configuration items for application development and business teams.
Build your asset and service configuration foundation with Service Collection Assets
Assets functions as your CMDB, mapping the relationships between IT components and business services. Assets in Service Collection lets teams create object schemas for the things they need to track, from laptops and mobile devices to servers, applications, facilities, vendors, and employees.
Teams can also model and map relationships between objects to build a more service-centric view of the environment. With Service Collection Assets, you can utilize our opinionated Common Data Model, Hardware Asset Management, integration, and reconciliation data layer for advanced data management.
For example, a business service can be linked to supporting applications, cloud resources, network devices, and responsible teams. That relationship data becomes especially valuable during incidents, changes, and audits.
Best practice: start small with one or two high-value services or asset domains, then expand. A lean, service-centric model is easier to maintain and more useful than an overgrown inventory.
Assets Discovery: How it works and how to start
Assets Discovery is a network scanning tool that automatically detects hardware, software, and configuration items connected to your local network — including workstations, servers, virtual machines, network devices, and installed applications — and imports that data into Assets in Jira Service Management.
The Discovery Tool supports both agentless scanning — using SSH for Linux/Unix and WMI for Windows — and agent-based scanning for devices that aren't always online or where you prefer not to open inbound ports.
When a scan runs, it pings each IP in the configured range, logs in to reachable hosts using stored AES-256-encrypted credentials, executes customizable pattern files to extract asset details, and packages the results into an XML file that is transferred to Assets.
It also supports additional import types beyond the Cloud offering, including database (DB), LDAP, and Jira users and groups imports.
To get started: download Assets Discovery from the Atlassian Marketplace, install the app in Jira, and download the Discovery Tool via Manage Apps > Assets Discovery > Discovery Download.
Get started faster with the hardware asset management template
The hardware asset management template gives IT teams a practical starting point for tracking common hardware assets and related lifecycle data. Instead of designing everything from scratch, teams can use a prebuilt structure to quickly stand up a useful schema.
This is especially helpful for common IT operations use cases such as:
Laptop and desktop inventory tracking
Employee onboarding and offboarding
Device assignment and ownership history
Warranty and refresh planning
Hardware issue triage and replacement workflows
Servers, network devices, or any other IT and IoT components
Templates reduce setup time while still allowing teams to tailor object types, attributes, and relationships to match their environment. Using templates will also allow you to benefits from Atlassian’s automations in the future.
Pro Tip
If you’re starting your asset and configuration journey, start with HAM. You can’t confidently know whether SAM is correct without the accurate number of HAM endpoints.
Use Assets Data Manager to improve trust in your data
Asset and configuration management workflows are only as strong as the data behind them. Assets Data Manager, available in Service Collection Premium and Enterprise plans, helps teams change to ingest, cleanse, and reconcile data from multiple sources into a more reliable source of truth.
With Assets Data Manager, teams can:
Bring together data from different systems
Identify and remove duplicates, gaps, and inconsistencies
Normalize and reconcile records before they affect downstream workflows
Improve confidence in reporting, service mapping, and operational decision-making
This is particularly valuable for operations teams that manage data coming from procurement systems, endpoint tools, discovery sources, cloud platforms, and internal spreadsheets.
Connect requests and incidents to the right assets
Jira Service Management allows teams to associate requests, incidents, and other work items with Assets objects directly from the issue view and portal. That gives agents immediate context during triage and resolution.
For example, when an employee submits a request for a laptop, the support team can see the specific asset, its owner, purchase date, warranty status, and any previously linked issues. When an incident affects a business service, responders can more quickly examine the related configuration items and dependencies.
Support service-aware operations with configuration relationships
Service configuration management extends beyond inventory. It helps teams understand how services are supported by infrastructure and how components relate to each other. This creates a service view that is especially useful in operations.
When a database server fails, teams don't just need the server record. They need to know which services rely on it, who owns them, whether there are any active incidents, and what other infrastructure may also be affected.
That connected view helps operations teams prioritize correctly and communicate with more precision.
Automate updates and operational workflows
Automation can help keep asset and configuration items up to date and reduce manual work. Teams can use automation rules to update ownership, trigger notifications, create work items, or respond to detected changes from discovery and imports.
Common examples include:
Assigning a laptop to an employee when a request is approved
Alerting teams when warranties or licenses are close to expiration
Creating follow-up work when discovery detects a change in the environment
Routing requests based on the selected asset or service
Walkthrough example: from asset request to operational efficiency
Here is a practical example of how IT infrastructure and operations service asset management can work in Service Collection with Assets and Jira Service Management.
Scenario
A growing company wants to improve how it handles employee laptop requests, tracks assigned hardware, and supports related incidents. Today, requests come in via chat, ownership is tracked inconsistently, and asset data is scattered across spreadsheets and device tools.
Step 1: Stand up the asset model
The IT team uses the hardware asset management template to create a schema for laptops, accessories, employees, vendors, and warranties. They add key attributes such as serial number, model, assigned user, allocated department, purchase date, status, and warranty end date.
They also begin mapping relationships between employees and assigned devices.
Step 2: Clean and consolidate data
The team uses Assets Data Manager to bring together data from procurement records, endpoint management tools, and legacy spreadsheets. Duplicate records are identified, missing values are flagged, and records are reconciled before being published into the operational asset schema.
Outcome: Instead of debating which shared spreadsheet or system is correct, the team now works from cleaner, integrated, and more consistent asset data.
Step 3: Connect assets to service workflows
The team adds Assets fields to its Jira Service Management ticket so employees can select or reference their assigned laptop when submitting a request. Agents can now open a ticket and immediately see the device record and linked history.
For a hardware issue, the agent can confirm whether the device is in warranty, check whether similar incidents have occurred, and decide whether to troubleshoot, repair, or replace it.
Step 4: Use AI and automation to reduce manual effort
When a new-hire onboarding request is approved, automation assigns an available laptop to the employee, updates the asset-assigned user field, and notifies fulfillment. When a warranty is nearing expiration, automation creates a review task for the IT operations team.
Step 5: Reduce business impact and optimize costs
With accurate asset relationships and lifecycle data, the team can quickly identify affected services, prioritize the right response, and reduce business impact when incidents occur. By reusing available devices, avoiding unnecessary purchases and renewals, and planning replacements based on real usage and warranty data, the team can optimize costs while maintaining reliable service.
What this looks like in practice
Stage | What the team does | Operational value |
Set up schema | Use the hardware asset management template to define core objects and attributes | Faster time to value with less design overhead |
Improve data quality | Use Assets Data Manager to reconcile inputs from multiple systems | Higher trust in asset and configuration data |
Connect to requests | Link assets directly to Jira Service Management tickets | Better triage and faster resolution |
Automate lifecycle tasks | Update ownership, notify teams, and create follow-up work automatically | Less manual effort and fewer missed steps |
Model service relationships | Map services to supporting configuration items | Clearer impact analysis during incidents and changes |
How to approach implementation
If you are building this capability for the first time, a phased approach usually works best.
Start with a small, high-value domain such as employee hardware or one critical business service.
Use a template like hardware asset management to speed up setup.
Import and reconcile data before scaling the model too broadly.
Add Assets context to request and incident workflows, where it will save the most time.
Layer in automation for ownership, lifecycle tracking, and notifications.
Expand relationships gradually to support stronger service configuration management.
Good first milestone: make it easy for an agent to open a request and immediately answer what asset is involved, who owns it, what state it is in, and what actions should happen next.
Customer spotlight: Riverty
We’re building a single IT service and purchasing desk in Jira Service Management for the entire company, turning a very long request form into two simple questions: Who are you and what do you want? It uses an identifier, like an email, name, or company ID, to pick up all relevant information on an individual from our back-end database, then cross-references that with our hardware inventory. This speeds up service and gives us one unified process for all offices, with standardized cost tracking through integration with Assets.
Alana Muirhead, Process & Service Quality Team Lead, Riverty
Frequently asked questions
What is IT asset management (ITAM)?
IT asset management (ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization's assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. It helps IT teams maximize the value of hardware and software while minimizing security and financial risks.
How does a configuration management database (CMDB) support ITAM?
A CMDB enhances ITAM by tracking the relationships and dependencies between assets. While ITAM tells you what you own, a CMDB tells you how those assets support specific business services, which is critical for incident and change management.
How does Atlassian’s IT Asset Management help agents resolve tickets faster?
With Atlassian’s Assets and Jira Service Management, agents can view the asset and service context they need directly in the request or incident. They can quickly see details such as ownership, location, lifecycle status, warranty, related services, and dependencies—without switching tools. By connecting Assets data to service workflows and automation, teams can route work, trigger follow-up actions, and resolve issues faster with a clearer view of what’s affected and what to do next.
Can agents take actions on Asset objects from within a ticket?
Yes, Assets when mapped to Jira Service Management requests can be populated and edited directly in the ticket.
Which cloud-to-cloud and discovery tools does Atlassian’s Service Collection ITAM integrate with?
Assets in Service Collection ingests asset and configuration data from MDMs, discovery tools, cloud platforms, procurement systems, and spreadsheets—including device, software, ownership, lifecycle, warranty, location, and relationship data.
How long does it take to set up Assets as an IT asset management solution and get value?
Teams can typically start getting value from Service Collection’s IT asset management capabilities in days to weeks, rather than months. The hardware asset management (HAM) template provides a prebuilt, ITIL-aligned foundation for managing common hardware and lifecycle data, so you can get operational quickly and tailor the model to your needs.
What types of assets can Assets ITAM manage?
Assets uses a flexible, schema-less object model that can manage virtually any asset type. Atlassian identifies three primary use case areas:
IT infrastructure and operations (HAM/SAM/CAM): Servers, laptops, desktops, mobile devices, network devices (switches, routers), peripherals, virtual machines, cloud resources, installed software, SaaS licenses, contracts, and vendors
App development: Business services catalog, application catalog, development and test environments, APIs, and code dependencies
Business teams (enterprise asset management): Contracts, vehicles, medical devices, telecom components, facilities equipment, HR records, and more
Assets also supports tracking people, locations, and organizational structures as objects, enabling full service-centric relationship mapping. For enterprise-scale discovery, partners like Lansweeper (covering IT, OT, IoT, and cloud) and Flexera integrate directly to auto-populate the CMDB.
How can ITAM help improve first‑contact resolution and reduce MTTR?
Assets improves FCR and MTTR by surfacing trusted asset context directly inside JSM tickets — no tool switching required. Key mechanisms:
Instant asset context on every ticket: Agents see device ownership, configuration, dependencies, and history the moment an incident or request is opened, eliminating manual lookups
Dependency mapping: When something breaks, teams can immediately see what else is affected and trace the root cause through relationship graphs
Enriched incidents via discovery partners: With Lansweeper, incidents are automatically enriched with affected devices, installed software, and owners at the moment of creation
Change risk assessment: Change requests can be assessed against the real estate of impacted assets and services, reducing blast radius
Can ITAM in Atlassian automate asset tracking and reporting?
Yes. Automation is a core capability, delivered through Jira Automation rules that read and write asset data. Out-of-the-box and configurable automation use cases include:
Assigning a device during employee onboarding
Changing asset status from "In Stock" to "In Use" automatically
Alerting before warranty or contract expiry
Routing requests based on asset type or owner
Triggering decommissioning tasks during offboarding
Lease-end and warranty-end notifications
Restock order triggers based on stock rules
What reporting and analytics are available in Atlassian’s Assets ITAM?
Assets dashboards are available for Service Collection Premium and Enterprise plans and provide built-in dashboard templates:
Services overview — aggregated views of applications, capabilities, business services, and software services
Objects by attribute — how specific objects and their attributes relate to each other
Objects by issue — how an object relates to Jira issues
Objects over time — how objects have changed over time
Attribute analysis — deep-dive into schema attributes