What is Assets Data Manager?

[#1]

Assets Data Manager was formerly known as AirTrack, and was acquired by Atlassian in October 2023.

What is Assets Data Manager?

Data Manager is a new feature for Assets in Jira Service Management that enables you to cleanse and reconcile your data and ensure it is Complete, Current and Correct.

• Complete - Data manager retrieves information from a wide variety of sources, using flat files (CSV), DB connections, and API calls from many third-party sources.

• Current - Data manager ensures that your information is current by running autonomously in the background after setup. Bringing in your data, cleaning it, and importing it can all be automated and scheduled to run independently.

• Correct - Data manager normalises, de-duplicates, and combines information from all of your data sources and fields to create the preferred records and values that make up a your single-source-of-truth.

This feature is available to Premium and Enterprise customers of Jira Service Management Cloud.

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What is Assets Data Manager used for?

• Data coverage - Data Manager can be used to validate the coverage of any tools in your system, to ensure that your ‘alive and wriggly’ tools in one system are ‘alive and wriggly’ in all and ensure that governance issues or system failures aren’t affecting your data.

• Data quality - Data Manager can also be used to validate specific information about any of your specific assets - for example, it can check that the Operating System as identified by different tools is the same in each source.

• Data integrity - Finally, Data Manager is a powerful ‘big data’ solution - once connected to multiple data sources, it can be used to validate not only the data within those sources, but the overall integrity of the data source tools themselves.

This feature was born from the IT Governance & Compliance space. It is often used for Enterprise Service or Asset Management, where it compares and cleanses data from different tools across delivery towers - service management, asset management, configuration management, cyber - to create accurate records and a better understanding of your data integrity.

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How does Assets Data Manager work?

Data Manager collects data using an on-prem client installed on a server within your domain. This client is not an agent or a discovery/scanning tool, but passively connects to your organisations management solutions to bring in data of all types.

After connecting to your tools, Data Manager collects data and applies proprietary logic (or allows you to define your own) to clean your data - removing duplicate objects, disabled objects, or objects not inventoried in each platform and generating a record of Total, Unique and Active (TUA) objects across each data source.

This data gathering, cleansing and merging can be scheduled and done daily with minimal (or no) human intervention. This fully-automatic compliance remediation means better service delivery, and less cost for your team.

The information produced by Data Manager can also be used to power other tools such as Assets in Jira Service Management, allowing your team to rapidly sync their service desk and their systems.

[Murthy A M]

Hello @Kate Archbold ,

Thank you for the information. When can we expect this to be available for use?

I had signed up for the beta program but unfortunately, I was told the seats were full for the beta program. Do we have an ETA on when this will be available in GA?

Regards,

Murthy

[Gary Blower _eficode_]

Are you forced to use the on-prem server or will the cloud adaptor layer also support direct cloud API connections to the likes of Azure/Entra and Device42?

[Kate Archbold]

Hello @Murthy A M , I can't give an exact date but we are working towards a GA launch around mid-year (calendar year Q3/Q4). If that changes, we will keep you posted with an update in this community group. 

[Kate Archbold]

Hi @Gary Blower _eficode_ ,

In order to pass data from your system into Data Manager, you'll use a client that will provide a secure connection so you can bring data from behind the firewall. At this stage, all data will pass through the client, and it will only connect to our available adaptors (which includes Azure/Entra and Device42 as well as flat file / SQL / aggregated data). Let me know if you have any other questions!

[Dylan Tuliszewski]

@Kate Archbold Good morning, will Data Manager be a part of JSM premium licenses or will there be an additional cost? Thanks!

[Kate Archbold]

Hey there @Dylan Tuliszewski, I can confirm that Data Manager is a JSM Premium / Enterprise feature, and there is no additional cost. 

[Paul Hecker]

Hi @Kate Archbold

Regarding your response to Gary Blower (eficode), I wanted to make sure I understood about bringing Device42 data into the CMDB via the Assets Data Manager.

Although there is already an app that enables a sync between Device42 and the CMDB, I "think" I understood that we could define a Device42 "connector" in Assets Data Manager using the Flat File - Data Source Aggregate - SQL, which could then leverage the asset reconciliation capabilities of Assets Data Manager.  Is that correct?

For that matter, could the Flat File - Data Source Aggregate - SQL method be used to pull the Assets Discovery data into Assets Data Manager?

Regards, Paul

[Denise Bardwell]

Hi team - how does Data Manager handle different Corporation / Manufacturer names such as Dell, Dell Inc, Dell Corp, Dell etc etc etc.  Does this happen in a cleanse phase?  Is there a product catalogue or do organisations have to configure this themselves?  Thanks.  Denise

[Knut Arne Ristebråten]

Hi @Kate Archbold

Is it any updated information about the timeframe for expected releases?

Earlier information you was working towards GA launch Q3/Q4, but I see in the Atlassian Cloud Roadmap that the Open Beta are expected in Q4 -24..

We are working on a Cloud Migration, so being able to know if we need to build alot of the setup regarding Assets outside of Atlassian products, or that we would be able to utilize Data Manager would be great.

[Murali Makam]

Need clarification on this: Data Manager collects data using an on-prem client installed on a server within your domain. 

What is on-prem client mean? Can the Data Manager client be installed in our AWS cloud virtual machine instance?

[Cecilia Grip]

Hi @Kate Archbold 

How will "Assets Data Manager (f.k.a. AirTrack)" work compared to the app "SM Assets - Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) Beta Integration" by Atlassian Labs?

Will "Assets Data Manger" replace the app entirely?

We are looking at configuring Entra ID import for the first time, and want to use the "correct way" from the beginning.

Is there any public documentation of "Assets Data Manger" yet?

Thanks,

Cecilia

[Karyn Findlay]

Hi @Murali Makam & @Cecilia Grip 

@Murali Makam to your question - the Data Manager Clients can be ran in cloud, they don't need to be an On-Prem server.  The key piece if that the server needs to be within your environment, rather than in Atlassians.  You need to be able to open firewalls to the server (where required) from other data sources.

@Cecilia Grip Data Manager does also have an EntraID connector, we have both EntraID Device and User - from this link you will see details of those adapters and the details of what they return.

We are just finalising the documentation, but it is there for a sneak peak.

[trthomas]

Hello @Kate Archbold 

Does Assets Data Manager have SSO in front of it?

Thank you

[Karyn Findlay]

Hi @trthomas 

Thanks for your question about authentication.  Basically, Data Manager does have SSO as

login is part of Jira as a whole which has SSO.

If you're logged into Jira then you're logged in via Data Manager too (providing you've been given access).  If you try to access Data Manager when not logged in to Jira you'll get redirected to the login page.

Hope that helps.

Regards
Karyn