What’s the Asset Management team like at KBTG?
Hello everyone, I’d like to share my internship experience at KBTG as an Infrastructure Service Management Intern, where I was assigned to the Asset Management team. When I was preparing for my internship, I couldn’t find much information about what this team actually does, so I hope this post helps anyone who is interested in the role.
The Asset Management team is responsible for managing all IT assets across KBTG. This includes not only physical hardware but also software assets such as software licenses. The team’s goal is to maintain accurate visibility of the organization’s IT assets, optimize asset utilization, ensure compliance, and improve cost efficiency throughout the asset lifecycle.
The department is divided into three main areas:
- Software Asset Management (SAM) — Responsible for managing software licenses, compliance, subscriptions, and software lifecycle to optimize licensing costs.
- Hardware Asset Management (HAM) — Responsible for tracking and managing physical IT assets throughout their entire lifecycle, from procurement to retirement.
- IT Asset Discovery (Discovery) — Responsible for automatically discovering IT assets, collecting hardware and software inventory, mapping relationships and dependencies, and maintaining an accurate Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
During my internship, I worked with the Discovery team. The primary responsibility of this team is to discover and inventory IT assets across the organization’s infrastructure. This involves collecting metadata from devices, including information such as the manufacturer, model, serial number, CPU, RAM, storage, IP address, and MAC address. On the software side, the team gathers operating system details, installed applications, running services, and many other configuration items.
Beyond simply collecting inventory data, the Discovery team also identifies relationships and dependencies between IT assets. For example, it can map application dependencies, identify which virtual machines are running on which physical hosts, and discover how infrastructure components are connected. The objective is to build a complete, accurate, and reliable Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that provides a single source of truth for the organization’s IT environment.
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To accomplish this, the team uses ServiceNow IT Asset Management (ITAM) and ServiceNow Discovery, a cloud-based automation platform for IT operations and asset management. Before running discovery, we first needed reliable documentation of existing IT assets so that the discovered information could be reconciled against the actual environment. We also worked closely with infrastructure owners to gather requirements regarding what information should be collected from their devices
Another important part of the process was ensuring that the necessary firewall rules were configured so that the MID Server could communicate with target devices. A MID Server acts as an on-premises agent that scans devices within the internal network, collects asset information, and securely sends the data back to the ServiceNow cloud platform for processing, reconciliation, and visualization.
Challenges
The internship was challenging but extremely rewarding.
First, there was a steep learning curve. I had never used the ServiceNow platform before and had very limited knowledge of enterprise infrastructure, so I had to learn both the platform and infrastructure concepts simultaneously.
Second, not every device is supported by ServiceNow’s Out-of-the-Box (OOB) discovery patterns. Depending on the vendor and device model, we often needed to customize the discovery process ourselves. In some cases, customization started from the Classification phase, while in others only the Exploration phase needed to be modified.
Finally, I also had opportunities to write JavaScript and regular expressions (RegEx) to extract specific information from discovered data, customize discovery patterns, and implement logic to prevent duplicate Configuration Items (CIs) from being created in the CMDB.
Overall, this internship gave me a much deeper understanding of enterprise IT infrastructure, IT Asset Management (ITAM), CMDB architecture, network discovery, and the importance of maintaining accurate asset relationships within large-scale organizations. It was a valuable experience that significantly strengthened both my technical knowledge and problem-solving skills.
