You might have read our recent series on asset management with Jira. This guest blog post from Tuncay Senturk of Snapbytes describes how you can use the Inventory Plugin for Jira to quickly and easily get started with asset management in Jira. Tuncay Senturk is the creator of the Jira Enhancer Plugin, Twitter Plugin for Jira, Time to SLA Plugin for Jira and Stateoscope add-ons for Jira.
Why inventories?
The primary challenge of inventory management is simple: As organizations grow, assets become distributed in different offices around the globe. Managing assets according to corporate policies is key to increasing operational efficiency.
Dozens of organizations have started integrating Jira with an inventory management tool in order to:
- track IT issues related to assets more quickly
- gain a clear view of their hardware and software assets
- generate more detailed reports
Teams still need assets – like developer machines, printers, servers, third-party software etc. – to build great software. When these assets are managed effectively, operating costs shrink.
Why Jira?
Inventory management software must excel in three areas: tracking, workflows, and reporting. Some organizations use complex IT asset management solutions to track assets, financial, and contract data. While these platforms are powerful, they are also extremely expensive, hard to use, and bloated with features most companies don’t need. Customizing these legacy systems for your team is time consuming, and integration with other systems is never a guarantee. Attempts often lead to “tool hell,” where administration and maintenance of these tools become a burden on project teams.
Jira is used by thousands of IT teams to track requests from users and improvements to systems and hardware. However, integrating Jira with legacy asset management systems can be a pain. Many organizations stand to benefit from basic abilities to create assets and link them to users and tickets, essentially creating a lightweight inventory management system. That’s why we built the Inventory Plugin for Jira. It’s a simple, user friendly, and holistic way to your inventory management needs.
With Inventory Plugin for Jira, you design your own asset creation forms, defined by custom attributes (similar to custom fields in Jira).
From there, it’s easy to attach these inventory items to any type of issue using the Inventory custom field. This is especially useful for IT teams using Jira Service Desk.
The plugin comes with a number of pre-configured gadgets and chars for Jira dashboards, like an overview of issues broken down by the CPU of the affected machine.
For most IT teams, the value of integrating asset management and Jira is obvious, but the devil is in the details. The Inventory Plugin for Jira can make it easy.