Q&A SPOTLIGHT: What you MISSED from our Webinar: A Panel with Osttra and Flexera about Assets

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Hello everyone,

Hope you had a fabulous summer or …winter!

If you missed the webinar, “IT Asset Management at Scale: Panel with Osttra and Flexera,” here is the link to watch it.

Big Thanks to @Dorothea Linneweber @John Sorensen from Flexera, and @Barry Kelly from Osttra.

Below are the Webinar Q&A. If you have additional questions, please comment at the end of the blog.

BTW, join me for the Complete, current, and correct data: Intro to Jira Service Management Assets Data Manager community event next week September 9th!

See you soon!

Silvia Davis

Sr. Technical Product Mkt Manager

Question	Answer
In your experience John, how much of that governance / updates / having correct up to date data can be automated with tools from Flexera and Atlassian?	It will necessarily be one of the famous "it depends" type of answers. In my experience the foundation for automating some of these processes will be trustworthy normalized and enriched data. I also see customers implementing "controlled" automation, and what I mean by that is having humans involved in confirming an automated approach for a period of time before switching on a fully automated process.
After establishing a stable standardized process internally, how did you also account for external changes that may have impacted cloud systems through vendor managed updates that may impact the overall CMDB relationships?	With Jira Service Management Assets, you establish relationships at the attribute level, making it easier to maintain asset relationships. Read more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/manage-references/ Data Manager enables customers to normalize, compare, and reconcile external data across various tools, establishing a single source of truth. Data Manager also detects discrepancies and allows you to prioritize which data will become the golden record based on predefined rules Read more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/data-manager-assets-data-manager/
What tools or resources are in place to manage and automate asset discovery and decommissioning/retirement? Additionally, do you have the ability to automate audits?	JSM Assets includes a discovery capability that you can start with. Read more here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/assetapps/assets-discovery-1168848103.html Assets Data Manager assists with data ingestion from various sources, including its own discovery tool and third-party tools like Flexera and Lansweeper. You can automate discovery, data ingestion, and reconciliation before importing into a schema. Audits are integral to Assets Data Manager, providing traceability of data origins and snapshots. Schemas and tickets also contain logs related to asset data changes. Audit logs for Assets were just released. Read more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/data-manager-assets-data-manager/
Has anyone managed to get full automation on discovery. cleansing and refresh of the Asset Database? We are still having to take manual steps to upload after discovery and cleansing	Assets Data Manager will help for sure. Importing data, cleansing and reconciliation can be automated in Data Manager via local schedulers Data Manager now has a native importer into a schema with a scheduling solution on the roadmap over the coming months too. In the meantime there’s a workaround available via automation. Read more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/data-manager-assets-data-manager/
Can Atlassian AD connection get more information and add then directly to an EMPLOYEE object? Besides getting more information it will also help if they can sync from Azure AD to the EMPLOYEE object instead of manually updating both the info on AD and on the EMPPLOYEE object.	If you are using the Data Manager Entra ID adapter and need additional fields, you can also use the ODBC/SQL connector or import data as a CSV/TXT into Data Manager. If you are not using Data Manager yet, it helps consolidate data from multiple sources, such as AD and your employee schema. Data Manager also synchronizes data sources and reports discrepancies.
Does the Services taxonomy exist in JSM Assets? (or Services)?	JSM Assets is integrated with Compass, and can bring Services into schemas. About Compass: https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass/features#catalog About Assets and Compass integration: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/synchronize-your-services-with-compass/
How many roles are required in an organisation to implement and also to maintain the CMDB	It depends on the organization's size. I recommend appointing an Asset Manager to define and oversee the process, along with a technical person to configure, maintain JSM, and integrate it with various data sources. These two roles will work closely to define the process, plan, set up, implement, and maintain data accuracy. Check this infographic and eBook: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/JSM-News-Discussions-discussions/Five-tips-for-practical-Asset-and-Configuration-Management/td-p/3098910
End to end lifecycle governance is critical for us, especially tying statuses like ‘in use,’ ‘retired,’ and ‘disposed’ into compliance requirements such as certificates of destruction. Could you share how you’ve designed object statuses to not only reflect lifecycle stages but also trigger automations and reporting in JSM Assets?"	Here are the default statuses available in JSM Assets. You can also add custom statuses. However, the level of maintainability you choose for assets may vary. Some customers integrate assets with ERP systems and map statuses to their corporate asset management systems. Ultimately, your approach depends on how detailed you want to manage the lifecycle and how this information will be shared with finance, procurement, and compliance. Learn how to manage statuses on Assets: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/manage-statuses/ Check the Assets guide: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/product-guide/tips-and-tricks/assets-cloud-get-started#1-access-assets
With Atlassian's release of Assets Data Manager. How do Atlassian and Flexera see their two platforms working together, and how customers (existing or new) could benefit from this relationship, particularly with integration into assets. How do you see this evolving in the future? Has Osttra implemented or began to explore data manager in their use case? If so, what benefits have you seen?	Data Manager plays a crucial role in aggregating data from multiple sources. While Flexera is one data source, companies often use various tools and schemas. Data Manager reconciles this information to deliver reliable and clean data. The Atlassian product team is collaborating with its technical partners to develop additional integrations and expand capabilities.
What discovery tool(s) did you use to map out all the tech stacks of your apps from server, through the layers, network, Databases etc... and what end user devices they are installed/used on. I'm assuming there was a lot of manual enrichment required as well.	With Jira Service Management Assets, you establish relationships at the attribute level, making it easier to maintain asset relationships. Read more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/manage-references/
Question for John: When Flexera One tool will have an available Write API for the good sync with Jira? For now it is unavailable action to automatize changes in the Flexera Hardware Asset Management from Jira. Example laptop assigned user in Flexera HAM cannot be changed directly from Jira. Service Desk engineer forced switch from Jira to Flexera and change user name of assigned user manually in Flexera according to Jira registered data. Because only Read API from Flexera is available for now.	Flexera's product management team is right now planning for enhancing its hardware asset management (HAM), i.e., your timing with this question is perfect, and write APIs will likely be included with these enhancements. In the meantime our customers often relies on feeds from Jira (and other ITSM tools) imported into Flexera One by scheduling adapters that keep the data in sync across the repositories.
Has anyone used Data Manager with their implementations and how has the affected your implementations? Is there more "stale" or "unclean data" being introduced due to no owners? etc	One important point about Data Manager is its cleansing capabilities, which prevent unwanted data from consolidating within the main object. Additionally, you can filter the data you want to import into the schema, and during the import, the attributes can be selected through mapping. The good news is that Data Manager requires one-time configuration, and automation handles the work. You only need to update the configuration if you introduce a new data source or need to modify an existing data source job.
How do you guys work around some of the quicks of Assets? Not being able to move Objects, even with the same Schema. JSM licensed users with the "Object viewer" Role in effect getting the "Object Schema User" permissions. The Assets Macro in Confluence showing "Unknown User" in columns with User attributes when the page is viewed by a user that does not have a Jira license. The reporting module being as bad as it is. We're in our early steps of getting into Assets and these are our biggest pain points.	Assets has a new underlying platform to enhance performance and scalability. Atlassian continues to invest significantly in Assets, as evidenced by the acquisition of Data Manager, and latest releases. We are in EAP for various new capabilities, including the new platform and reporting. Stay tuned for our ongoing delivery of new capabilities. More news to come at the Atlassian Team’25 EU. Feel free to submit requests with suggestions to include them in our backlog. Here is the link.
What is the best mechanism to use when setting up automation between ITAM and infrastructure systems such as Nutanix, EntraID or other data systems like Qlik?	We have a couple of options to bring data into schemas. Assets Data Manager ingests data from multiple sources. We offer an out-of-the-box (OOB) adapter for Entra ID and over 20 other systems. Additionally, we provide an ODBC/SQL adapter, or you can ingest CSV/Text files. You can also bring data to schemas using Atlassian Marketplace apps, APIs, and static imports. Read more information here: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/data-manager-assets-data-manager/ https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/import-objects-into-asset-in-jira-service-management/