Asset Management unveiled: Exclusive features and insights

Roy: Hi everyone! Itay: Hello everyone, good to see everyone here. 

Dima: Germany, Canada, okay, yeah. So, before we begin, guys, on the right-hand side you will see the Q&A section where you can post your questions. We will definitely respond to them at the end of this session because we have a lot of ground to cover. We will show you how asset management will work and advance inside Atera UI and not only UI, but in the whole ecosystem. 

Let’s have another maybe 20 seconds before we actually begin. For all the people who are new to our webinar library, I will probably share on the screen, and Lior, if possible, can you share the link in the chat? You can always go to atera.com/webinars. We have a bunch of stuff there which you can access on demand. You can watch it at your own pace. Some of them are walkthroughs, some are in-depth into specific features, and some are partner sessions. You can always see our schedule for the upcoming webinars. Definitely check it out and don’t forget to follow us on all our socials, LinkedIn included but not limited to, so you can stay up to date with what we have for the sessions to come.

Okay, let’s get back to the main topic of today’s webinar: Asset Management Reimagined. I think a lot of people have joined. Welcome, everyone. Lior, thank you so much for pasting the link. So, guys, feel free to bookmark this and maybe open it in a secondary tab so you can go there after we finish with the session. Today’s topic is asset management reimagined. Where do I begin? It’s a hot topic. Roy and Itay can confirm this. It’s a highly requested feature to have in Atera. It existed for quite some time; however, we discovered that there is a more extensive need to have the data around the devices and to connect the dots between the physical realm of the assets and the realm of RMM, which includes all the RMM actions that you can possibly do with your assets if those devices are IP-driven.

Let’s start with the agenda. As I said, today I’m accompanied by two wonderful people from our product team. We will give you a bit of a background if you’re new to asset management in general. We will show you what’s different between the old and the new version of the product. We will do a quick demonstration of what’s to come in the phase one of the upcoming feature, and we will also give you a sneak peek and some teasers of what’s to come in the coming quarter/year. We will be definitely happy if you post questions as we move through the slides and the demo. We will be happy to respond to them in the last 15 to 20 minutes of the demonstration. 

As I said, I’m accompanied today by Roy and Itay. Itay, you can join me back. I think everyone would appreciate if we can see your faces. Asset management was quite a hot topic inside Atera. Roy, maybe one of the first questions we discussed briefly: How long was it in discussion, designing phase, and development? 

Roy: Yeah, so I got into this project actually together with Itay in January. We did extensive user interviews and mapped all the gaps our customers have around asset management. What you’re going to see now is the result of all this process, user interviews, and surveys that we conducted and got into this solution. 

Dima: Okay, great.

Okay, let’s move on with a bit of a step back and transition into the basics. What you see right now on the screen, and what we’re going to talk about, are the fundamental aspects of asset management as a whole. Even though the icons are present on the screen in a linear fashion, this process is more of a cycle rather than a linear process. So take this with a grain of salt. This process can contain, or might not contain, several steps out of all six. However, we decided to include these exact six steps in the next generation of Atera Asset Management. It all begins when you’re trying to purchase a device as a company. Then you need to distribute it across your employees, do some software deployments, and ensure that it’s monitored, up-to-date, patched, and secure at all times. You need to know when to service and decommission devices, and rinse and repeat as you move forward with all things related to asset management. The larger your organization, the more devices you’re likely dealing with—potentially not just hundreds, but even thousands. This can get taxing, especially when managing an insane amount of machines. This is where asset management comes in. 

Previously in Atera, we had a very slimmed-down version of asset management. It was mainly present in the UI and had several features. It was mostly a manual process, except for the mass import feature for assets, which was added several months ago. Aside from this, the reporting capabilities and device tracking in the assets tab inside the site or customer section were very limited. However, through extensive research, questionnaires, and customer development calls, we found a good formula that can work for most of our customers. But we are still open to feedback, and this session is exactly about that. At the end of the session, there will be a survey, and we will definitely be happy for any feedback you can share. We’re in this together and will be more than happy to develop this feature further with you. 

The new solution gives you a more comprehensive lifecycle management experience. It provides that connection between custom assets as physical devices and monitored devices as they are present right now in the devices section of Atera, which we will cover in the demo part. The new solution is mainly focused on making these two realms connected and talking to each other in a seamless way. To complement how these components will work together, we are working on improving the reporting capabilities on the platform. We are also working on a highly requested feature: warranty fetching from hardware vendors. We’ll talk more about this in a second. 

Without further ado, let’s switch to our demo environment and begin. I will be accompanied by Roy and Itay, and I would appreciate it if you guys can jump into the conversation so it’s not just me talking into the void. Roy: We’re always here with you. 

Itay: Yes, great. We’re waiting to see reactions to what is being presented and discussed. Your opinion is very important to us. This is also a part of the reason for doing this webinar.

Dima: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so as you can see, I’m in the customer tab or sites tab, depending on which product you are using inside Atera. Right now, you can see that the assets tab looks a bit different from what you are used to seeing. If you’re an existing customer or trialing customer, you can go right now in your demo environment and you will see the old UI, which is missing several columns that are present here on the screen. These columns consist of several things, and again, this is phase one of this solution, but it will be much more robust in the coming quarter. 

Let’s look at the UI. As you can see, the devices you see here look way more different than they do now. The assets represent all the devices, regardless if they are laptops, keyboards, or something else. You can group those devices by the asset type so you can get a quick overview of what’s happening inside your organization. You can also filter by contact and understand which person has what. This is very crucial during the onboarding and offboarding phases. You will see which equipment belongs to which person, the status, the warranty dates, and you’re able to delete and modify things as you move through the editing capabilities that we offer at the beginning phase of this feature. You can change the status if something changes with the device. You can also change the purchase date if it was not entered into the system accurately. Warranty expiration is the same thing. You can reassign it to a different person if the device has switched hands within your organization, and you can assign it to a different folder (though we don’t have them in this specific customer). 

What’s more interesting is that you can also see what is in use. More than that, the filtering capabilities are also present here. As you can see, one of the main filters related to the data we are presenting today is warranty tracking. We will be introducing warranty expiration in phase one. Disclaimer: it will be a somewhat manual process; however, with the mass asset import, it will be somewhat automated because it can be pasted at scale. 

In future phases, Roy, maybe you can shed some light on the warranty aspect that we’re working on. What can we expect from the warranty fetching perspective? 

Roy: Yeah, so basically we are currently working with Dell. The first phase, which is the second phase, will have automatic fetching for Dell. Afterwards, it will be Lenovo, HP, and other providers. We will discuss this more in the roadmap section at the end of the presentation.

One thing I wanted to show here is the “Group By” feature. If you can show it again and choose status, and group by status, here you can actually see an inventory view of all your assets by customer or by site. You can see, “Okay, I have a new headset, a new keyboard, monitor, laptop.” Maybe you’re missing something and need an extra asset. This will help with inventory management. It’s a minor step, but very beneficial to understand what’s available for that customer or site. 

Dima: Absolutely. The contact grouping, as shown before, is something that was hard to see in the previous UI. Now, it’s very easy. You just see the contact, group by contact, and can choose and see all the assets Itay, for example, has. Itay: Yes, I see I have many here. 

Roy: Don’t leave just yet! 

Itay: Yeah, when I leave, I need to return many things. 

This is a use case. One of the use cases is checking out who has what. From here, you can also group by folder. The idea is to give you as many tools as possible to see your inventory the way you need to see it.

Dima: Okay, and the most important topic: warranty. This lives in the filters. The warranty expiration will have many options to choose from. For example, you can see from here which devices are about to expire in terms of warranty and take managerial actions accordingly. You can anticipate what’s running out of life, maybe you need to replace it, or contact your vendor to extend the service contract. To my experience, a lot of companies have something to cover the hardware, maybe extensive support. Whenever you need this information, this is exactly where you obtain it. Also, by purchase date, you can track and trace which device was bought in a given period of time and move forward with the data you have in your possession. 

How does the import happen? The feature that was introduced recently was the ability to import assets at scale. Importing assets at scale…So this is where you can define which custom asset you have. Basically, you can define which device has which attributes, and you can import them at scale regardless of the quantity. It can be dozens, hundreds, or thousands. I witnessed a live import of more than 4,000 devices on one of the calls. It’s as easy as selecting the asset type, and all the relevant fields will be present in the template you can download below. You import the assets accordingly. One of the fields, probably for laptops and headsets and everything else, will be the serial numbers, but it’s something that we will cover very soon.

Back to the asset tab, anything to add, Roy, before we move forward? 

Roy: Yeah, I also see questions around device connection here. This is the first phase, which doesn’t include the connection to the device itself. We will show it in the next steps and soon in the presentation. I understand the need to ask where are the devices because we know from our research that it’s the number one challenge: how to have all these devices and assets and treat them together in harmony. We will answer this soon. Dima: Historically in Atera, devices and assets coexisted but were in different rooms, if I may put it in simple terms. Now we’re finally breaking this fourth wall and making them connected. 

Dima: Each and every asset can be accessed, and you will see its status and all the fields. You can also add custom fields, even the price for the device, the purchase date, and all that. The main thing is that all these custom fields will also be present in the advanced reporting moving forward. You will soon have the ability to see the respective data as a dataset in advanced reporting, which will come very soon. 

The current UI already allows you to do mass actions and track warranties. Very soon, it will give you the possibility to track and trace warranties, giving you more control and understanding of what you have in terms of assets. But the main question remains: how do you connect the devices and the assets, and what do they have in common? I briefly mentioned that in the devices tab, there is a parameter that is very unique to each and every device: the serial number. This is what we’re about to cover in the upcoming phases of the feature. Let me switch back to the presentation so I can show you. I’m seeing many questions in the chat and the Q&A. I’m trying to answer as many as I can. A lot of the questions are great and exactly what we set out to address. As I just mentioned, the challenge we are here to tackle is how to attach an asset to an existing device in Atera. 

Roy: The future involves representing the physical device, such as a laptop, and linking it to the monitoring device. The need here is for everyone to be able to track the real inventory, not just the devices on Atera. This includes assets that are on the shelf or on the way to you. These are crucial for inventory management, not only for MSPs but also for IT departments. 

Dima: This feature is coming to both ITD and MSP environments. It will be available on all plans. On our pricing page, you can see across the subscription levels that we offer tier two, tier three, and tier four subscriptions. You will see the amount of custom assets you can possibly have: five on tier two, 20 on tier three, and unlimited on superpower and enterprise. This will be the difference, but the feature itself will be available to every type of product that we currently offer. Mark, anything else to add before we wrap up this segment?
I think your question received a lot of likes, so addressing this. I see some similar questions in the feed. Okay, let’s move back to the future. How will it look? As you can see, it will look a bit different. There are a couple of things you will probably notice in this UI, and I will do my best to focus everyone’s attention because it’s hard to follow spreadsheet-style pictures in this regard. 

This is why I’m introducing the “Manage Inventory” button. This button doesn’t exist in phase one but will in the coming phase right after phase one. As you can see, there are three actions you can take to manage your inventory: asset types, device type mapping, and automations. Device type mapping is key here because it will specifically target making Atera understand how physical assets talk to remotely managed devices. To fully utilize this, we will even introduce a new section inside Atera. It will be a separate section with a new button in the menu on the left called “Asset Inventory.” 

The asset inventory section will show you all your assets. This is very important to stress because asset inventory will be per customer or per site, and there will be a general list in a separate tab to see everything that you have in your possession. There are situations when you need to transfer a device from one site to another or maybe repurpose the device between customers. There are plenty of use cases to see here, but we will get to this in the future. 

Sorry to cut you off, Roy. I just noticed some comments in the comment section talking about the blurriness of the images. Maybe we can pull up the backup photos that we have to ensure everyone can see clearly. 

Roy: Sure, let me do this right now. Let me stop sharing and share a different window instead. 

Dima: Okay, let me know if the screenshot I’m about to present is any better. Okay, I found it. I think you can see it right now. 

Roy: Yes, it’s better than before. Let’s wait to see the reactions. 

Dima: Javan said it’s nice. Okay, so this column represents the linked devices. As you can see, in one specific case, you need to add a serial number to one of the laptops to actually link it to an asset. This is crucial because if it’s a laptop, you might have many questions: is it monitored, patched, secure, in use, or even online? This is where the mapping component, which I just covered a couple of minutes ago, comes in. 

The mapping process will be a one-time effort, set-and-forget style. Our UI will allow you to identify which platform represents which type of device, which OS type represents which type of asset, and connect them accordingly. It will utilize the serial number in both cases to cross-reference each of the realms and connect them to one another. 

Maybe Roy and Itay, I would love to have an open conversation with you so you can shed some more light on the technicality of what’s happening. 

Roy: Sure, let me quickly go by flow. You just purchased, let’s say, 20 Mac computers. You import them and say these are my assets. In some cases, you can get the serial numbers in the receipt or in the service you are using. The idea is to create those assets as physical assets. You don’t have an agent yet, but you can insert the serial numbers for each device. In the future, we’ll have a barcode scanner to help with this, but you can also just insert it manually. 

Once you purchase them, they get a status of “purchased,” then they get into the inventory. You bulk change them to “in stock,” so they are in your stock. Then you decide to install an agent. Once you install an agent, we will check if the serial number that you defined on the asset matches the agent that just got online. When this happens, we connect the two, and they become one. You will be able to see the asset information on the device page and the device information on the asset page. You can then continue managing the lifecycle of this asset. If you delete it, you can delete the asset as well and manage the lifecycle of that physical thing. In regards to the mapping and automation from day one, we want to achieve two separate flows. The first one is if you created an asset and put the serial number, it will connect to the agent. The second one is if you didn’t define a serial number—let’s say you didn’t want to insert it—we will have the option to automatically create the asset information with some default values once the agent goes live. So, you will be able to manage it. It will create the asset when the agent is live, allowing you to decide if it starts with it or if it comes later on when the agent is installed. These are the two main automation flows we will handle.

Here on the screen, you can see that once you are in the asset page and decide to put a serial number, we will check and mark it. If there’s an agent, we will automatically connect the agent to it. You can connect an asset by serial number or search by device name, and we will connect it to the asset. This is the third option for connecting a physical asset to an agent, which is a monitoring software. 

We are adding the serial number field to any of your assets, regardless of the asset type. This will give you the ability to track serial numbers for anything, even if it’s not a laptop or a monitor device. Secondly, it will allow you to insert serial numbers ahead of time before you link, for example, all of your Mac devices to a specific asset type. You can insert your serial numbers to any of our existing assets if you have them today on Atera. Once you do the matching, they will match automatically. 

Dima: We have many questions to answer. Some of them were answered in written form. However, I suggest we pull some of those on the screen and maybe come back to them. Before we do that, I would love to spend some time giving people the roadmap of what’s to come because it might address some of those questions related to timeline and features. 

The next thing we’re going to discuss is the roadmap. In October 2024, we’re going to release the redesigned assets tab and customer inside page. This will address questions regarding availability to the IT department version and MSP version. There will also be new advanced report presets available from tier two and up to complement the newly added tab to capture relevant data. 

Phase two is the end of 2024. There will be a separate asset inventory page and device mapping added to the platform. The same goes for warranty data fetching for Dell as one of the first vendors connected to our asset management platform. Phase three involves further improvements, enhancing your experience with more functionalities and warranty data fetching for more vendors that you all mentioned in the chat and Q&A section. This includes not only Dell but also Lenovo, HP, and eventually Apple. 

Roy: I’ll just say a few words to summarize the phases. Phase one is what Dima showed live to you—the asset tab as part of a customer or site with group-by, filter, and a much better experience around assets. Phase two will be around the device as an asset. We feel it will be grown enough to have its own menu item, equivalent to the devices. Part of it will be warranty automatic data fetching for Dell. If you enter the serial number, you will automatically see the purchase date and warranty expiration date without needing to insert it manually. Gradually, we will add this to other vendors. The third phase involves gathering feedback and continuously improving the tool based on user interviews. 

If we have a couple of minutes, I’d like to go over the use cases. One use case is you create a new asset in Atera because you just purchased it. The asset is on its way, so it has the status “purchased,” which is a new status we’re introducing. You insert the serial number, and once it arrives, you change the status to “in stock.” Once the agent installed on that laptop wakes up for the first time with the Atera agent, the status changes to “in use” automatically. It pulls all the device data, such as the assigned contact and the name, intertwining them until you decide to detach them or uninstall the agent. Another use case is you didn’t log the asset into Atera ahead of time. You just install an agent on your asset, and when the agent wakes up, it looks for matching serial numbers. If it doesn’t find any, it creates an asset for itself with the status “in use,” assigning the contact and name automatically.

Dima: Those are the main two use cases that we identified and that will be included in this phase. I think we covered most of what we had for today. However, we have some time for a Q&A session. Please don’t leave just yet because we will have a survey at the end of the session. Your feedback is extremely important to our product team and will help us make meaningful improvements as we move forward with phase two, phase three, and beyond. Leor will post the survey shortly. Let’s switch to several questions now. 

One of the questions I saw multiple times: Can the upcoming expiration of a warranty trigger an alert? 

Roy: What we found out as part of our explorations with customers is that you don’t really need alerts for warranty expiration. You can define a scheduled report that you send to yourself in the advanced report area. For example, every week or every second week, you will receive a list of assets whose warranties are about to expire. We are not planning for alerts unless we get strong feedback around it. This scheduled report will be available soon in the first phase. 

Dima: Another question from Rob and several others: Are the updated asset management tools available at all Atera license levels? The answer is yes. However, your subscription level will define how many custom asset types you will have access to. As mentioned earlier, a tier 2 subscription gives you five custom asset types, tier 3 gives you 20, and tier 4 (superpower and enterprise) offers unlimited custom asset types. Another related question: We have a plan that allows for five asset types. Does that include laptops and desktops? 

Roy: It’s up to you how to utilize the custom asset types you have access to. You can create an asset called “device” and map all device types to that one asset. Alternatively, you can create an asset called “MacBook Pro” and map only Mac devices to it. Later on, we will have more granular mapping based on properties, but this is not in the current phase. 

Another question from Chris: Can you import assets from the Atera devices? 

Yes, this is exactly what we are going to do for you. You will be able to map device types to asset types. During the onboarding to this new page, and later in your settings, you will be able to map, for example, all of your Mac devices and PC devices to a “computer” asset type. This mapping will allow you to automatically import existing devices to the inventory. 

Dima: Let me pull up the mapping options for Mac, Linux, and server. 

Roy: This mapping process will be part of the onboarding and settings. You can say, “I want my PC device types and Mac device types to be linked to a ‘computer’ asset type.” This way, the import is automatic. You just specify what you want and how you want it, and we bring it to you. For example, you can see that Linux and server device types are mapped to a “server” asset type. This allows you to automatically attach them to a server asset type you created. We are actively working on expanding the granularity even more in future phases, so you can have not only device type mappings but also property-based mappings, such as all MacBook Pros or iMacs. 

Dima: We are getting deeper into the details here. It’s nice to see it all coming together. The only question I have left is: Do Androids dream of electric sheep, as one book says? 

Roy: That’s a good one, Dima. 

Dima: Before we wrap up, don’t forget to fill out the survey that Leor will post shortly. Your feedback is invaluable to us. Thank you for joining today’s session and for your insightful questions.
I will share this question on screen: “Where can we vote for vendors to be added?” Just to create an absolute no-pressure situation, I will paste the link in the chat. You can make a post on our user voice portal and upvote what you would like to see—what’s the most important vendor for you to have beyond what we are about to release in the early stages of asset management. This is exactly the place to share your preferences. Also, feel free to share this information with your customer success manager during any call or interaction. This is how we capture feedback and forward it to Roy and Itay. The product team and many more people in the CS department cover a bit more ground with customers. We will be happy to share this feedback and make it loud so that we can make it happen as fast as possible without sacrificing quality. 

Roy: There is another interesting question about an existing capability. Nathan asks if we can expand it to track software licenses too. You can use the current system to track anything you want, including software licenses. You can create an asset called “Office 365” and for each of your licenses, give the name and serial number. This way, you can keep track of all your licenses with whichever granularity you want. This exists today unless you meant something more automated. 

Itay: Managing Office 365 is quite hard. You’re usually using the Office 365 APIs to understand the number of licenses you have. It’s many things all at once, actually. It has initials; it’s called SAM (Software Asset Management). We have it in a more basic, manual way, and maybe in the future, we will extend this as well.

Roy: Another recommendation: Don’t forget that brands like HP also have monitors, printers, and all that kind of stuff. You’re right; you don’t have to do only laptops. We have SNMP devices, and we will look into fetching warranty information for those devices as well. 

Dima: We are almost running out of time. Leor just read my mind and posted a message. There will be a survey for you to fill in so we can capture your feedback. Roy and Itay can take their homework with them and maybe do some final touches for phase one and the upcoming phases. Feel free to fill it in. It will be available to you in a second. I think it’s already open, so you will see it next to the chat and Q&A. Feel free to fill it in and send it our way. The more feedback, the better. We would appreciate any extra information you can share with us. 

Roy: The questions in the Q&A and chat show us how timely this is. We’re very happy about the granularity of the questions. I hope when we release this new generation of asset management, it will answer your questions and wishes. We will keep researching; it’s a huge world, and we’re definitely doubling down on it. 

Itay: When we started this project, we thought, “Okay, this is nice, but we have devices and custom assets in Atera. What else could you want?” As time passed, we realized that this is very critical for you guys, for our customers. It may be one of the most critical aspects of your day-to-day work. I’m very happy for the opportunity to work on it with Roy and to bring it to life. 

Dima: Thank you so much, guys. It was a pleasure talking to you today and sharing all the content. Excuse us if there were any technical hiccups with the platform. We made the best plan B’s, backups, and everything to make it look as nice as possible so you can see everything. You will still get the recording afterwards. Don’t forget to fill in the survey, join our community pages, and participate in future webinars. We have them every other week. Feel free to check out atera.com/webinars, which is pinned by Lior. Thank you so much for attending and investing your time with us in Atera and the upcoming features. Thank you so much, guys. I appreciate it. Bye for now. See you in the next one. 

Roy: Thank you very much. 

Itay: Thank you very much.