Asset Management covers the physical and financial side of your IT estate — hardware, purchasing, licenses, and support contracts — separately from the CMDB's focus on how systems depend on each other. An asset can be linked to a CMDB CI, but they're tracked for different reasons: the CMDB answers "what breaks if this fails," Asset Management answers "what did we pay for it, who has it, and when does support run out."
Tracking hardware and other assets
Asset Management covers hardware, software, network equipment, peripherals, and anything else worth tracking, each moving through a lifecycle from ordered through received, in store, deployed, and eventually retired or disposed — only the valid next steps are ever shown as options. Each asset carries its purchase details, warranty and support-contract expiry, an optional link to a CMDB CI and a cost center, and a depreciation schedule that PulseServe recalculates automatically over time.
Purchase orders
A purchase order moves from draft through submission, approval, and receipt. Approval starts with a manager and automatically escalates to a second tier if the order's value crosses a configured threshold — the approval chain is visible on the order itself, including who approved what and where it escalated from. Rejecting requires a reason.
Software licenses and contracts
License pools track how many seats you've bought, their type (per-seat, concurrent, enterprise, subscription), cost, and expiry — assign or revoke a seat to a specific user (and optionally a specific asset) as needed, with a utilization bar showing how much of the pool is in use and a warning as expiry approaches. Maintenance contracts track vendor support agreements the same way — term, cost, coverage, auto-renewal, and a reminder window before they lapse.
Staying license-compliant with SAM
Software Asset Management is the compliance layer sitting on top of your license pools: a canonical catalog of software products, a review queue for anything discovered on your systems that doesn't match the catalog yet, and a compliance view comparing how many seats you're entitled to against how many are actually assigned and actually installed.
- Catalog — the reference list of known software products your organization tracks.
- Review Queue — software found on a system (via the inventory feed or a CSV upload) that couldn't be automatically matched. Resolve it against an existing catalog entry, or add it as a new one — either way, PulseServe remembers the match so the same software is recognized automatically next time.
- License Compliance — for each license pool linked to a catalog product, see entitled, assigned, and installed counts side by side, with a status flag (fine, at risk, or over-allocated) so a licensing gap surfaces before an audit does, not during one.
Example
A quarterly inventory feed reports fifty installs of a design tool the company only licensed thirty seats for. The mismatch shows up immediately in License Compliance as over-allocated. Digging into the Review Queue, an admin finds several installs were reported under a slightly different product name and had landed there unmatched — resolving them against the correct catalog entry corrects the count, and procurement is left with an accurate, smaller true-up to buy rather than a guess.