Centralize Tanium Data with xAssets IT Asset Management

Introduction

Tanium is a widely deployed endpoint management platform. It provides real-time visibility into desktops, laptops, servers and virtual machines, and it collects detailed hardware and software inventory on every managed endpoint. For organisations that run Tanium, the data is of excellent quality, making it a good starting point for IT Asset Management and, in particular, for Software Asset Management and Software Compliance.

Tanium on its own is not an asset management system. It does not track purchase orders, contracts, warranties, licence entitlements, refresh cycles, disposals or financial values. It is not designed to merge data from other discovery sources, handle off-network assets, or support approval and procurement workflows. That is the role of an ITAM toolset. This article describes how xAssets pulls Tanium data in and builds those processes on top, in the same way it does for SCCM, Intune, JAMF and other systems management tools.

Benefits

• One consolidated inventory covering Tanium endpoints alongside every other asset source
• Use Tanium software inventory directly for Software Asset Management and licence reconciliation
• Combine Tanium data with purchase, contract, warranty and financial records
• Detect devices that Tanium cannot reach or where the agent has stopped reporting
• Run request, approval, ordering, receiving, deployment, warranty, RMA, obsolescence and disposal workflows against Tanium assets
• Normalise and classify software titles across all sources, not just those collected by Tanium
• Map Tanium users, departments and locations into a single organisational view
• Retain asset history after a device is retired and the Tanium record is removed

Centralizing Data

Most organisations use more than one system to track endpoints. Tanium covers managed computers. Intune, JAMF or Kandji may cover mobile devices and Macs. Network Discovery picks up printers, switches, routers and unmanaged devices. Finance systems hold the cost and depreciation data. Procurement holds the purchase and warranty records. HR systems hold the user, department and location assignments. None of these sources is complete on its own, and none of them reconcile against each other automatically.

xAssets is designed to merge data from all of these sources into a single asset register. Every record carries its source, its last update time, and the fields it contributed. When a device appears in Tanium and also in Intune or Active Directory, the data is matched and combined rather than duplicated. When a device drops out of Tanium, the asset record remains in xAssets and can be moved through the correct disposal or retirement process.

The result is the same single-pane-of-glass view that customers build with SCCM or Intune as their primary source, but with Tanium data in place. Customers who run Tanium alongside SCCM or Intune can feed all three into xAssets without choosing between them.

Integration

The Tanium integration uses the Tanium Asset Export REST API. xAssets authenticates with an API token issued by the Tanium Gateway, pages through the /plugin/products/asset/v1/assets endpoint, and loads the data into the xAssets Network Discovery pipeline. From there the normal matching, classification and update rules apply, so Tanium data is treated consistently with every other discovery source.

The integration extracts:

• Computer identity — name, serial number, manufacturer, model, chassis type, virtual / physical flag
• Operating system, version and service pack
• CPU, memory, logical disks and free space
• Network adapters, IP addresses and MAC addresses
• Assigned user, domain, email, department, city and country
• Installed software titles, versions and publishers
• Last seen timestamp and created / updated timestamps

Configuration is done through the Integrations form in xAssets. The administrator enters the Tanium Cloud or on-premise URL, the API token, and selects a Tanium View if only a subset of columns or endpoints is required. The integration runs on a schedule, supports retry on rate limits, and can be configured to auto-dispose endpoints that have disappeared from Tanium for longer than a defined period. Setup is normally complete in under an hour.

Software Asset Management

Tanium software inventory is able to drive Software Asset Management directly. The Tanium integration returns the installed title, version and publisher for every endpoint, and Tanium's SIU data covers normalised product identification where it is enabled. This is a higher level of data quality than Intune provides out of the box, and is comparable to SCCM with Asset Intelligence switched on.

xAssets takes this data into the software recognition engine, applies its own normalisation rules, and matches the results against the purchased licence position. The same data can then be used for licence compliance reporting, for Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle and other vendor audits, and for identifying unused installations that can be harvested. Usage data from Tanium's SIU product usage feed can be incorporated where a customer has SIU licensed.

For organisations that already run Tanium, this removes the need to deploy a second inventory agent purely for SAM. The existing Tanium deployment becomes the hardware and software discovery layer, and xAssets provides the entitlement, compliance, and optimisation layer on top.

Hardware Asset Management

Hardware records imported from Tanium are loaded into the same asset register used for every other type of asset, including fixed assets, network devices, mobile devices and anything entered manually. Once in xAssets the record is no longer tied to Tanium's view of the device. It carries the full set of HAM fields — asset number, barcode, location, cost centre, purchase order, supplier, warranty expiry, depreciation method, book value, status and owner.

xAssets Network Discovery can also scan the environment directly, to find devices that are not in Tanium at all — network equipment, printers, unmanaged servers, and devices whose Tanium agent is missing or broken. Those records sit alongside the Tanium-sourced records in the same register.

Lifecycle Processes

Once the data is centralised, the ITAM processes that sit on top of it become straightforward to operate. xAssets provides standard workflows for:

• Requests — self-service requests for new hardware or software, with catalogue, costings and approvers
• Approvals — multi-level approval routing based on cost, department or asset type
• Ordering — purchase order creation, supplier selection and budget checks
• Receiving — goods-in, tagging and stock room management
• Deployment — assignment to a user, location or cost centre, with update back into the ITAM record
• Warranty management — automated tracking of warranty expiry, with Dell and Lenovo warranty lookup built in
• RMA — return and replacement tracking against supplier and manufacturer
• Obsolescence — reporting on end-of-life hardware and software, with refresh planning
• Disposal — retirement, data destruction records, resale or recycling routing, and audit trail

Each of these processes uses the Tanium-sourced record as the authoritative technical view of the device, and adds the financial, contractual and operational data that Tanium does not hold. A device moves from request through to disposal under a single asset identifier, with Tanium continuing to update its technical state throughout its working life.

Reporting and Compliance

With Tanium data consolidated into xAssets, standard ITAM reports become available without further work — installed software by publisher, licence compliance by product, hardware refresh by age, warranty expiry by month, devices not seen for N days, devices with no agent, cost by department, depreciation by cost centre, and so on. Custom reports and dashboards can be built against the same dataset.

Summary

Tanium can be used as the primary inventory source for an ITAM implementation. xAssets pulls the data in through the Tanium Asset Export API, merges it with other sources, drives Software Asset Management off the Tanium software inventory, and provides the request, ordering, deployment, warranty, RMA, obsolescence and disposal workflows that Tanium does not cover. The same pattern that customers use with SCCM and Intune applies directly to Tanium, with the added benefit that Tanium's software data is usually of high enough quality to drive SAM without additional collection or manual intervention.

Further Reading

• Modernise ServiceNow Asset Workflows with xAssets ITAM and SAM
• Use xAssets as a ServiceNow Discovery Tool
• Add value to Intune with an IT Asset Management toolset
• View Intune Asset Data in JIRA Tickets
• Best Practices in Software Asset Management
• Temporal Software Asset Management Calculation