What is an agent?
An agent collects information about the different assets, like their performance or availability metrics, and processes them in a central monitoring station.
They are commonly deployed on mobile devices like laptops or phones that employees might take home. An agent only has to be installed once and from there on requires little to no maintenance or additional infrastructure.
How Do I install it?
You can download the agent from Spiceworks and install it on various assets. As soon as it is installed, the agent will review all applications installed on the computer drive and then add these applications to the inventory system.
Unfortunately, the Spiceworks’ agent only exists for Windows, so Mac or Ubuntu should be registered though scanning instead (see next step).
To implement the agent, follow this tutorial by Spiceworks. It explains how to download, configure and deploy it on your devices.

Step 4: Scanning IT assets
The scanning process works through your workplace’s network. It covers all non-portable devices as well as anything that cannot be registered through an agent. This type of registration requires less administration and is very simple to set up.
And this is how it works:
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Have your PC connected to the local network and the Spiceworks software installed before setting it to "scanner" mode.
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It will then execute the scans approximately every 30 mins.
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The PC will then attempt to categorize and inventory any devices identified in the scan. This includes anything with an IP/MAC address that the PC can see.
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If there's a new device since last scan it will attempt to extract all the data it can, and then add it to the existing inventory list.
The only downside is that the automatically collected data is not always complete. You will occasionally have to verify that there are new portable devices registered in the inventory.

Step 5: Registering Online assets
Registering is a little more challenging for online assts than it is for already installed applications.
By scanning for URLs in the browser history, you can see which services are being accessed. If your organisation uses Office365, you can look for part of the URL which contains ‘Office’. Then you will be able to see if the different assets have visited such a URL.
However, you cannot search for a service you don’t have the URL for. This is an issue that log management can help with, which you can read more about here.
If you have both, the log management system would list all accessed unregistered cloud services. The IT asset management system would then allow you to specifically look for devices that have accessed the service.
That's it. You are done. After registering your company’s assets, you should have a clear overview of all physical and digital IT assets.
You can now be sure that only authorised applications and services are being used within your network. It will also help you identify any possible vulnerabilities in your security setup. From here on, you will only have to install agents on new assets and register new cloud services that you choose to use. Maintaining the system mainly consists of making sure it is up to date.
A next step could be to implement a Log Management system.
