On Thu, 2 Jul 2009, Derek J. Balling wrote: > We recently had a meeting between our data-center operations folks and > our bean-counters. The long and the short of it was, for companies > where they have SOX compliance to deal with, etc., etc., how granular > are other people getting on their asset tracking.
my initial reaction is to figure out what is meaningful for you to track for your own purposes, and then see if there is anything else that accounting cares about. > For example,... > > - When you upgrade a server from 16GB to 32GB, does accounting get > notified that the valuation of the server has changed for depreciation > purposes? When you swap out the 146G hard drives for 300G hard > drives, is there any accounting controls you enforce for that type of > action? you care about this don't you? so you need to record it somewhere, let that tool do the notification for you (or produce reports, or whatever. and let accounting tune the alerts/reports so that as they change their policies about what they want reported as their requirements change) one key thing is that there is a pendulum effect here. to start with they want you to account for _everything_ (I've had to track mice, CGA video cards, etc), so you, in theory, know where every dime ever spent is. then as time goes on they realize that the cost of the time you (and accounting) are spending tracking these things _far_ exceeds the value of what you are spending, and you end up tracking less and less until eventually something is lost track of (not nessasarily stolen, just moved by one person who wasn't there when another needed to find it), and things swing back towards accounting for everything. > - Is there anyone who is ACTUALLY tracking their hard drives and > individual DIMMs through their enterprise, even if they were bought > separately later as an upgrade to an existing piece of hardware? I've been close to this, but have managed to avoid it. I've found that they usually want _more_ tracking on the parts purchased seperately, and they have P.O.'s for those specific part what I do is I define specific configurations and track which asset tag numbers are which configuration. I try _very_ hard to not change the configuration after I purchase a machine. but if I need to do so I then try to change it to another standard configuration, and if I can't do that I define a new configuration in the inventory system. this seems like a lot of work (and it is), but I've now been in this job for 12 years, and I've tried not tracking as much info, with the result being that eventually I need to reallocate a machine that was purchased 5 years ago, reallocated twice already, and I don't know what is in the machine without physically getting hold of it. > - What do you do when you take that 16GB out of the server above and > toss it on a shelf as being obsolete? Does accounting ever know? or > care? no, they don't know or care > - Do you bother to tell accounting when $VENDOR comes out and swaps > out a motherboard, changing the serial number of the hardware in the > process? (and yes, for some vendors, a replacement motherboard DOES > change the serial number). If you don't, doesn't that really hamper > the ability to audit the asset tracking when asset ID # N used to > belong to S/N XXXXXXX and now belongs to S/N YYYYYYY? if it changes an externally visable serial number I change the inventory, otherwise I don't bother. even if it does change something externally visable, put the old info in a notes field (preferrably through automated means) and only really track the newest version of things. > - Do you tell accounting when you ship hardware from one colo facility > to another? it updates the inventory, which accounting uses. I don't explicity notify them. the key thing is to figure out what differences matter. you recognise this and are struggling with it. try to automate the system as much as you can (how much can be gathered by a custom CD/USB stick that you boot the system from?) in my case, the only pice if information that accounting has ever asked for that I didn't end up wanting to have for my own purposes is what I term purchase information: the real serial number of the box (after all, I can track it by the company asset tag ;-) exactly when it was purchased what P.O. it was purchased with for everything else, imagine that you just walked in the door for your first day. what information would you want to have about particular machines. David Lang _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
