Asset tag for Hardware Assets

[Kenneth3]

Hi,

What are the main advantages and/or best use cases to populate the Asset tag and then in particular for Hardware Assets?

// Kenneth

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

The asset tag identifies the asset as something that your company owns.  That is the emphasis here.  From a cost management and financial management perspective, your asset tag is the primary identifier for an asset.  Your financial tools may not even support or require a serial number to track these assets.  It is primarily a financial element.  The asset tag could be on a computer, network device, rack, or even on a piece of furniture.  Its purpose is to track things that have a financial value to the company.

The best practice is to establish an asset tagging scheme and a process for receiving the assets whereby a human being affixes a physical asset tag label to the actual physical device, and then enters that asset tag (ideally using a barcode scanner) to the asset record in the asset register.  An alternate approach could be to have ServiceNow automatically generate an asset tag which could then be affixed to the device, but this should still happen during the receiving process before the asset has been deployed.

In the absence of a formal asset tagging process, some users will use the serial number as the asset tag.  The benefit here is that it is (generally/mostly) unique and can (often/usually) be scanned by a barcode scanner, which will help you to perform stockroom and location audits, even without an asset tag.  That said, this would not be the recommended practice.

Worth noting that some companies will also use flash technology to write the asset tag to the BIOS of a system, which may be useful in identifying the device, but even so, serial number should still be the primary method of uniquely identifying a hardware asset from a technological perspective, while asset tag identifies the asset from a financial perspective.