Asset Health Management (AHM) helps organizations to proactively monitor and manage the condition of physical assets, in order to minimize downtime and extend asset lifespan. This is a relevant part of IT Asset Management (ITAM), and they typically go hand in hand to ensure that all assets are properly managed.
There are many different approaches to Asset Health Management, but all share a common goal: to ensure that your organization's assets are performing at their best and that any risks to their health are minimized.
Keep reading to find out what AHM entails, and how InvGate Asset Management can help you implement it in your company.
What is Asset Health Management?
Asset health management (AHM) is a proactive approach that helps organizations monitor the condition of critical assets to identify potential risks and address them before they lead to failure and costly, unplanned downtime.
Furthermore, AHM provides a real-time view of your assets' health, enabling you to determine exactly when to perform maintenance based on the actual condition of the equipment. This approach lays the groundwork for condition-based maintenance (CBM), a type of preventive maintenance that lets teams decide when to service assets, avoid unnecessary maintenance, and extend their lifespan.
Let's review quickly the benefits of implementing an Asset Health Management process:
- Early detection of risks to your resources.
- Avoiding downtime, failures, and disruptions.
- Optimizing asset performance.
- Improving asset lifespan and reliability.
What does AHM entail?
Asset Health Management encompasses a range of activities, from asset performance analysis to asset condition monitoring. Here are some of the tasks that typically fall under AHM:
- Monitoring asset performance and usage metrics.
- Analyzing asset performance data to detect abnormalities or trends.
- Establishing asset health baselines as reference points for comparison.
- Identifying asset maintenance requirements, such as regular servicing or repairs.
- Developing asset replacement strategies based on asset health data.
- Implementing safety regulations for asset use and operation.
Establishing an Asset Health Management strategy
Now that we know the typical tasks included in AHM, we can take a look at how to develop a basic Asset Health Management strategy. Typically, it'll consist of these five steps:
- Asset health diagnostics: The first step is to understand the IT assets' current health and how they are performing.
- Asset health prognostics: Prognostics tries to predict what will happen with the asset in the future. By knowing its health state, your IT asset managers can foresee potential issues or changes in health.
- Asset health maintenance: This step is pretty straightforward and includes all the methods available to either maintain or restore an IT asset's health to expand its lifecycle: maintenance, repair, and operations.
- Asset end-of-life decisions: At this point, the asset has reached its full lifespan. Based on performance assessments and organizational needs, the decision to retire an asset typically falls in the hands of IT asset managers, the IT department, finance teams, and/or compliance officers.
- Asset disposal: If, in the previous step, you decided to end the life of certain devices, you must come up with an ITAD (IT asset disposal) strategy. Basically, you need to decide what are you going to do with the IT assets you no longer need. Here, you might consider donating or destroying them, depending on your industry compliance regulations.
Using InvGate Asset Management as your Asset Health Management system
Since it's a complete IT Asset Management solution, you can use InvGate Asset Management as your Asset Health Management software as well. The health data comes from the same records you already use to track each asset.
To start with, once you create your IT inventory, you have a complete map of the devices in your network, kept up to date with every scan, along with their software and hardware details, the contracts associated with them, owners, and location. This alone is enough for you to start making informed decisions regarding their lifecycle management.
Do you have an old fleet of devices that needs to be replaced ASAP? Do you have inadequate assets for the tasks they're performing? Do you have warranties about to expire? Health rules answer those questions for you, and the sections below cover what they are, which conditions they check, and how to use them to flag devices for refresh.
What Health rules are in InvGate Asset Management
Health rules are how InvGate Asset Management puts asset health monitoring into practice. They take the idea of IT asset monitoring alerts one step further: you set the conditions that matter to your organization, and the platform assigns every computer a health status based on them. Since both the parameters and the criticality scale are yours to define, the rules adapt to each company's needs and compliance requirements. Once that's done, you'll see a color coding next to your assets indicating:
- Green (Safe): your devices are in good shape.
- Yellow (Warning): there's a warning worth reviewing.
- Red (Critical): your devices are in critical status and need attention.
Health rules evaluate computers, and most of their conditions read the data the InvGate Agent collects from each device. That makes asset health part of the inventory itself: the status sits on the asset record next to its hardware, software, warranty, and ownership data, so there's no separate monitoring tool to maintain.
Which conditions you can configure in Health rules
The condition library covers both hardware and software parameters, so a single rule can describe IT asset health from several angles at once. It's organized in six areas:
- Lifecycle and finance: warranty is expired, warranty will expire in less than a defined window, current value is equal to or lower than a defined amount.
- Service demand: number of open requests above a defined quantity.
- Performance and capacity: CPU usage, RAM usage, and disk I/O above a threshold on a 7-day average, available disk storage below a percentage or a number of MB, battery health below a defined level.
- Updates and patching: any, important, or critical OS update pending for over a defined period, reboot pending, time without update.
- Security and configuration: antivirus deactivated or not installed, encryption deactivated or not detected, firewall deactivated or not installed, Windows license not activated.
- Software governance: banned software detected, under review software detected.
Each rule can hold several of these conditions, which lets you translate a real concern into a status. A high number of open requests points to a device that keeps generating complaints, low available storage flags a machine that needs more space, and a disabled firewall or antivirus signals a compliance risk.
How to use Health rules to flag devices for refresh
Health rules turn the lifecycle and performance data already in your inventory into a shortlist for your hardware refresh plan. Each flagged device shows its status next to the asset along with the conditions that triggered it, so the refresh discussion starts from evidence. A rule built for refresh typically looks at:
- Warranty: expired, or expiring within the window you set.
- Current value: equal to or lower than the amount you consider worth keeping in service.
- Open requests: above the quantity that marks a device as costly to support.
- Performance and battery: CPU, RAM, or disk I/O above your threshold on the 7-day average, or battery health below a defined level.
From there, the rest of the platform acts on that shortlist:
- Automations: the health status can be the condition of a custom automation, which runs several actions in the same rule, such as sending a notification, sending a report, or updating a field.
- Smart Tags: a tag such as "refresh candidate" applies automatically to any device that matches your criteria and drops off when it no longer qualifies.
- Atlas: adds manufacturer End-of-Life and End-of-Support dates to asset records in cloud deployments, the lifecycle signal that complements Health rules.
- Smart Recommendations: when a recommendation surfaces a device health issue, such as battery problems or a disabled antivirus, you can create the Health rule directly from it.
- Reports: you can quickly create reports to share the refresh shortlist with managers and other stakeholders.
As you can see, InvGate Asset Management can be the perfect companion to automate and monitor your AHM strategy, from the first health check to the replacement decision. To see Health rules working on your own devices, start a 30-day free trial or talk to Sales.
Key takeaways
AHM is just one aspect of a proactive IT Asset Management strategy. By applying it, you can rest assured that your company devices are fitted to the task they're assigned to, and quickly spot the ones that might not be in the near future.
Therefore, you'll be able to:
- Take preventive measures before issues or service interruptions arise.
- Have reliable information on your IT physical assets performance.
- Use your budget wisely to invest in hardware your company actually needs.
And the best thing is that you can use InvGate Asset Management as your complete ITAM tool. Request our 30-day free trial and start addressing potential issues before they become major problems!
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Health rules in InvGate Asset Management?
Health rules are the feature InvGate Asset Management uses for asset health monitoring. You define the conditions that matter to your organization, and the platform assigns every computer a status of Safe, Warning, or Critical based on them, shown with a green, yellow, or red indicator next to each asset.
Which conditions can Health rules check?
The condition library covers six areas: lifecycle and finance, service demand, performance and capacity, updates and patching, security and configuration, and software governance. That includes checks such as warranty expiration, current value, open requests, CPU, RAM, and disk usage, battery health, pending OS updates, antivirus, encryption, firewall, and banned or under review software.
Which assets do Health rules apply to?
Health rules evaluate computers. Most of their conditions read the data the InvGate Agent collects from each device, so the health status sits on the asset record next to its hardware, software, warranty, and ownership data.
How do Health rules help with hardware refresh planning?
A rule built for refresh can look at warranty status, current value, open requests, performance, and battery health, and flag the devices that match along with the conditions that triggered their status. From there, automations can use the health status as a condition to send notifications or reports, and Smart Tags can classify devices as refresh candidates automatically.
Where do manufacturer end-of-life dates come from?
Manufacturer end-of-life dates come from Atlas, which adds end-of-life and end-of-support dates to asset records in cloud deployments. Health rules complement that signal with warranty, value, performance, and security conditions, so together they cover the full lifecycle picture.
