Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An IT asset audit is one of those processes most IT teams know they should run regularly and rarely do well. Records drift from reality, licenses go unchecked, and the first sign something is wrong usually arrives as an auditor's request or an unexpected vendor notice. This guide explains how to perform an IT asset audit step by step, what to verify for each type of asset, and where the evidence for each check comes from.

Clear workflows make everyday work easier, but only when people can build and use them without friction. A process shouldn’t depend on technical skills or one specific owner to exist or make sense. InvGate Service Management’s no-code workflow builder focuses on accessibility from the start. Teams create workflows using a drag-and-drop editor, reusable building blocks, and no-code action connectors, which keep each step easy to follow and modify.

When AI knows how to resolve a ticket, teams still need a way to decide how much it can do on its own. Today, that often means choosing between keeping a human in charge of every action or giving the AI broad autonomy. There’s no practical middle ground, so teams get stuck wherever they started, usually the most conservative setting. Even when AI already knows the right answer, the ticket still ends up in a human’s queue.

InvGate Asset Management now tracks certificates, AI agents, automation workflows, and scripts as native Configuration Items (CIs). Each one carries the ownership, lifecycle fields, alerts, and change history already applied to hardware and software records. The components that run daily operations without appearing in any inventory now have a place in one. These four CIs are a starting point rather than the full definition of a digital asset.

Shadow IT is any hardware, software or IT resource running inside your organization that the IT department never approved, never configured and, in most cases, does not know exists. It covers the file sharing account someone opened with a departmental card, the personal laptop plugged into the office network, and the AI assistant installed on a work machine last Tuesday. None of it is necessarily malicious, and all of it sits outside every control you have.

An IBM warranty check sounds like a ten second task: type in the serial number, read the expiration date. In practice, a lot of people hit a sign in screen or a result telling them the machine cannot be found. The reason is rarely the serial number itself. Most hardware that people still call IBM is serviced by Lenovo today, so half of these lookups happen on the wrong website.

An ITSM maturity model is a practical framework for measuring where your Service Management stands across people, processes, technology, and governance, then turning that baseline into a prioritized improvement plan. Most models describe five levels — from ad hoc to optimized — with clear characteristics and outcomes at each stage. This guide explains the levels, how to assess your current state, how to map capabilities to ITIL 4 practices, and actionable steps to get started.

Ask an IT administrator what they mean when they say they need a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and more often than not, they are describing something else entirely: knowing what assets they have, who is responsible for each one, and what breaks if one of them fails. That is the job of the Asset Management Database (AMDB), the lifecycle record built to answer exactly those questions.

A logistics company running 2,000 Android devices across 15 distribution centers manages that fleet through SOTI MobiControl, which pushes apps, enforces policies, and tracks location every day. None of that visibility used to reach the company's core IT inventory. The IT team filled the gap with a weekly CSV export that drifted out of date within days: a reassigned tablet kept showing under its old owner, and a decommissioned scanner stayed in the count for months after it was retired.

InvGate Service Management includes a no-code workflow builder that helps teams automate processes such as onboarding, access requests, and offboarding. Built-in Action Connectors extend those workflows beyond the platform, allowing them to retrieve information from external tools or trigger actions in them instead of stopping when another system is involved. You can keep processes moving across the tools your teams already use, reducing manual steps and keeping related actions connected.