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Hi everyone,

I’m currently doing an internship where I’m responsible for the inventory and classification of company assets, such as:

  • Workstations
  • Servers
  • Network devices
  • Mobile apps
  • IoT devices
  • Cloud assets
  • Installed software

I’m trying to consolidate data from different tools (Tanium, Cortex, Intune, Cisco Meraki), but it’s really difficult to handle duplicates and mismatches. I also want to calculate a margin of error between tools.

For classification, I’m using the CID model (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability), but I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.

Has anyone worked on something similar? Any tips on:

  • How to perform reliable cross-tool reconciliation?
  • How to compute inventory error margin?
  • How to make CID-based classification more useful for business context?

I’d love to hear from others with experience. Thank you in advance!

6 Spice ups
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How big is the company, are they spread across multiple sites or just one location? Is there any health/safety issues if you just walk around with a pen and paper to get a physical count? That’ll also help you get familiar with everyone while you’re at it.

2 Spice ups
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You could check this out, some free tools are listed at the bottom
https://www.goodfirms.co/it-asset-management-software/blog/best-free-open-source-it-asset-management-software

2 Spice ups
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SpiceWorks has built-in inventory management, too, and if you’re using their cloud helpdesk, you can tie/track tickets to hardware/users. It’s pretty handy if you need to report on outages at the user or system levels.

2 Spice ups
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It’s a company with at least 800 employees, so it’s kind of overwhelming to do the inventory manually. Are there any other methods besides these?

1 Spice up
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Inventory programs (including the one included with SpiceWorks) are plentiful, it will depend on your needs. Just do some research on what these programs do before you use them, and above all, get it approved internally or you might find yourself crossing security!

1 Spice up
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I have to ask, cause this company is using 4 different apps/ways to do inventory, and offloaded it to an intern to handle?

I would suggest, asking whomever put you in charge THIER preferred method of inventory: use that.
I would access the others, manually, and do spot checks, with pen and paper and onsite visits, take pictures of components rooms/s/n’s etc… talk others, and use those spot checked inventories to feed into and start the one preferred method by the person who put you in charge of this: If your an intern, your probably (maybe hopefully?) going to inherit this system, so go with what’s expected, and do the literal footwork too make it real.
Spreadsheets with maps is helpful 4 and 5 years later when your looking to remove/upgrade a switch or a box that is not visited often enough.

1 Spice up
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…or at 3am when you get a call that something dropped and you’re searching for the connection mentally. Go pull up the old maps!! We used to all carry a 3-ring binder with network maps for each location, very detailed…every hackers’ wet-dream all in one!

1 Spice up
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This is a great opportunity to learn some sales and leadership skills. Draw up a plan for a new, comprehensive audit/inventory of the entire company. Sell management on the need for some additional staff to help. Do a physical listing and verification of everything. Scrap the mess you had before.

2 Spice ups
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Piggybacking off of @TimJjr 's “asking whomever put you in charge THEIR preferred method of inventory” first.
Then, what I would do is download the device list from each of the tools ( Tanium, Cortex, Intune, Cisco Meraki).
Consolidate all the data to a spreadsheet (this will be your draft), and identify all the duplicates via Serial Numbers.
Once you cleaned up your sheet, assuming you are taking all the info by face value, upload it to the inventory system that will be used.

I understand that you have 800 devices, yes that’s a lot, but how many of these devices are correctly inputted in the system? This is why we recommend spot checking or you go around and document them down yourself, so you know these are the correct info. Verify, verify, verify.

Assuming the 800 employees have 1 device, 1 peripheral, and 1 consumable.
What items should be part of the inventory management?
How many of these items are either in use, in storage, damaged, lost, obsolete, or need to be e-wasted?
How many of the 800 are correctly assigned or need to be re-assigned to the correct user(s)?

We are not even counting shared devices such as printers, AP’s, switches, phones, and dock stations yet.

Starting this from a fresh start, you would be able to do the maps and 411’s of the devices. That’s the silver lining, you can literally create this to your own liking and system.

2 Spice ups