Automation and Asset Management should go hand in hand but they rarely do. We’ve been working with Acela, a new Cisco ITAM tool, to change that. Having come from technology backgrounds in various environments we’re all used to scrambling for asset inventory data, EoL/EoS status and trying to get a handle of what needs to go into next years budget.

How does Acela alleviate this pain? Simply put, we can piggy back an existing monitoring solution such as Solarwinds or deploy our own via a quick Virtual template. From there, we can discover all the devices on the network  and create an inventory pool. Then our backend API’s speak directly with Cisco’s data repository. This is to closely cross reference each device with the varying levels of status, contract numbers and end dates, EoS/EoL states, software version, image name, and more.

This continuously automated interaction takes the manual maintenance completely out of it. Instead of viewing things on a per device basis as demonstrated in our previous Cisco Asset Management article, we can start to custom build reports for management and budget committees.

This list of pre-built reports can be further customised to suit your goals and modified to suit your particular needs.

When you buy and swap-out hardware, the automation takes care of updating the data on a nightly basis. There’s nothing required by your staff to update Acela or Cisco. It’s completely hands free.

A great byproduct of automation is not letting things slip through the crack. We’ve all had the misfortune of calling support for help with a device, you provide the serial number and they tell you either the product doesn’t have a support contract associated or that it’s expired.

With Acela’s automated Cisco Asset Management, you’ll never have that concern. We can automate a report or dashboard view that clearly shows which devices operating on the network have no contracts associated or expired contracts.

Our proactive approach to Asset Management is designed to streamline contract management, asset management and budget planning. You can read more about Cisco Asset Management with Acela here.