Freshservice IT asset management: Benefits, limitations, and alternative
Table of Contents
- Freshservice IT asset management: Streamlining asset management
- Limitations of Freshservice IT asset management: Consider these before you commit
- Introducing Virima: A powerful alternative to Freshservice IT asset management
- Virima vs Freshservice IT asset management: A feature-by-feature comparison
- The clear choice for comprehensive IT asset management
Tired of juggling spreadsheets and struggling to keep track of your IT assets? You’re not alone. Many organizations rely on IT asset management software features within their existing help desk or ITSM tools, like Freshservice IT asset management.
Freshservice offers a set of features to help organizations track and manage their IT assets. But is it the right solution for your needs? Let’s delve deeper into the benefits, limitations of Freshservice IT asset management, and explore a powerful alternative – Virima’s automated IT asset management platform.
Freshservice IT asset management: Streamlining asset management
Freshservice IT asset management helps organizations gain a basic understanding of their IT assets by offering functionalities such as:
- Asset inventory management: Track key IT asset details like hardware type, software licenses, purchase information, and warranty status. This centralized repository allows you to find information about your assets quickly and easily.
- Asset lifecycle management: Track IT assets throughout their lifecycle, from initial procurement to deployment, ongoing maintenance, and eventual retirement. This helps ensure optimal asset utilization and simplifies the disposal process.
- Change management: Manage IT asset changes efficiently. Freshservice IT asset management allows you to track changes made to hardware and software configurations, ensuring all stakeholders are informed and potential issues are mitigated.
- Software license management: Track software licenses and monitor usage to ensure compliance with vendor agreements and avoid costly audits. Freshservice IT asset management can help identify unused licenses and optimize software spending.
- Reporting and analytics: Generate reports on IT asset data to gain insights into asset utilization, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions about future IT investments.
While Freshservice IT asset management offers these functionalities, it may not be suitable for organizations with complex IT environments or those seeking a more comprehensive ITAM solution.
Limitations of Freshservice IT asset management: Consider these before you commit
While Freshservice IT asset management offers some basic functionalities, there are limitations to consider:
- Limited asset discovery: Freshservice IT asset management primarily relies on manual asset entry, which can be time-consuming and error-prone for large IT environments.
- Lack of real-time insights: Freshservice IT asset management offers limited real-time data and reporting capabilities, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of your IT asset health and utilization.
- Limited automation: Automation capabilities are limited, hindering the potential for significant efficiency gains and requiring significant manual intervention.
- Scalability concerns: Freshservice IT asset management may not scale well for organizations with a rapidly growing IT infrastructure.
- Limited integration capabilities: Freshservice IT asset management may have limited integration capabilities with other third-party software, which can create challenges for businesses using multiple IT management tools.
These limitations can hinder your ability to achieve true ITAM efficiency and gain a comprehensive understanding of your IT environment.
Introducing Virima: A powerful alternative to Freshservice IT asset management
Virima’s automated IT asset management platform offers a robust and feature-rich alternative to Freshservice IT asset management. Virima goes beyond basic asset tracking, providing a comprehensive suite of features to empower organizations to:
Broad asset discovery
Virima’s IT Discovery is designed for comprehensive discovery across a wider range of IT assets than Freshservice IT asset management can handle. While Freshservice IT asset management may struggle to fully identify and manage cloud resources, IoT devices, and network infrastructure like firewalls and load balancers, Virima excels in these areas.
Virima’s solution effectively discovers data center infrastructure (servers, network, storage), virtual assets (applications, virtual machines, hypervisors, containers), edge devices (desktops, printers, IoT), and cloud resources from providers such as AWS and Azure.
Flexible discovery with agentless, agent-based, and API integration options
Virima combines agentless, agent-based, and API discovery methods, offering flexibility and thorough data collection. The agentless discovery option simplifies deployment, making it ideal for recurring scans of always-on/always-connected devices such as servers and network infrastructure.
The agent-based discovery methods provide continuous, near real-time monitoring of assets, capturing changes, and usage patterns, and ensuring accurate data for devices that may intermittently connect to the network.
Whereas the API integrations ensure seamless discovery from cloud resources, hypervisors, and other IT asset management tools. This combined approach ensures thorough data collection, covering a wide range of devices and environments while maintaining flexibility and adaptability to suit various IT infrastructures and management needs.
Deep discovery including relationship and dependencies
Virima provides a deeper discovery experience than Freshservice IT asset management, capturing detailed insights into IT assets and their interactions, including network topology and application dependencies. Virima’s service mapping solution leverages this data to create dynamic and interactive visualizations of IT services and their dependencies.
This comprehensive view is crucial for effective IT asset management, change risk assessments, and root cause analysis for incident response, where overlooking these connections due to less comprehensive discovery could lead to management and security gaps. Furthermore, Virima’s advanced ViVID feature overlays ITSM records (which we’ll discuss later) onto these service maps to provide operational intelligence.
ITSM record overlays on Virima’s service maps by the ViVID feature
Secure discovery
Virima employs strong encryption and methods to safeguard sensitive data throughout the discovery process, something that Freshservice IT asset management may not extensively highlight. The platform is purpose-built on AWS with multi-tenancy and full data segregation between tenants.
Additionally, asset credentials are never stored in the cloud, agentless commands can be granularity restricted, and discovery data is encrypted in transit, ensuring secure transmission and storage. Customers have additional peace of mind knowing that Virima adheres to safe business practices as evidenced by yearly AICPA SOC 2 Type 2 certification.
Scalability
Virima’s IT Discovery solution overcomes scalability limitations inherent in Freshservice IT asset management and many other tools. It seamlessly scales to handle the demands of large enterprises and rapidly evolving IT environments without compromising performance or reliability.
Unlike tools that struggle with increasing asset numbers and require costly software deployments, Virima maintains consistent speed and accuracy, making it ideal for dynamic environments. This robust scalability ensures efficient and seamless IT operations even with an expansive number of locations, cloud environments, and asset classes.
Cost-effectiveness
Virima offers competitive pricing of the discovery bundle (which includes a CMDB, service mapping, and the innovative ViVID feature) compared to other alternatives to Freshservice IT asset management. Also, unlike many discovery solutions, Virima’s pricing is transparent and predictable, with no hidden costs for adding service mapping or discovering additional locations.
Virima offers faster time to value and higher ROI while offering robust and impactful capabilities at a lower TCO. Virima’s ability to deliver extensive features without unnecessary expenditure stands out as a benefit for cost-conscious organizations.
Bi-directional integration capabilities
Virima goes beyond basic one-way integrations. Virima’s bi-directional integration allows for a dynamic exchange of data between Virima and other IT asset management platforms. This enables Virima’s ViVID feature to overlay near real-time operational data, such as incident tickets, and change requests directly onto service maps.
This provides IT and security teams with valuable insights into the impact of IT events on service performance and helps them proactively identify and address potential issues and access change risks.
Automation
Virima significantly enhances IT discovery efficiency through robust automation. Automated scan schedules ensure consistent and timely data collection. It streamlines agent deployments and check-ins, providing continuous monitoring and accurate inventory. The automation of data normalization and enrichment ensures consistency while adding valuable context to asset information. Furthermore, the bi-directional CMDB syncing is automated to maintain up-to-date asset information across the IT infrastructure.
Near real-time insights into the impact of IT events on service performance are provided through automated ITSM record syncing. Also, the automated report generation and sharing simplify data analysis and distribution, enabling proactive decision-making. These automation capabilities not only improve efficiency and reduce manual effort but also enhance the accuracy and reliability of IT discovery data.
Virima vs Freshservice IT asset management: A feature-by-feature comparison
| Feature | Freshservice IT asset management | Virima Automated IT Asset Management |
| Asset discovery | Primarily manual | Automated and agentless discovery |
| Real-time insights | Limited | Comprehensive near real-time data and reporting |
| Automation | Basic workflow automation | Extensive automation for key ITAM processes |
| Scalability | May not scale well for large environments | Highly scalable to accommodate growth |
| Vendor management | Limited functionality | Robust vendor and contract management features |
The clear choice for comprehensive IT asset management
While Freshservice IT asset management offers a basic solution for some organizations, Virima’s automated IT asset management platform provides a more comprehensive and scalable solution.
With its robust features, near real-time insights, and powerful automation capabilities, Virima empowers organizations to achieve peak ITAM efficiency, optimize resource utilization, and gain a competitive edge.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your IT assets? Schedule a demo with Virima today and discover how our innovative platform can transform your IT asset management processes.
