SCORE

Level

There's no consolidated inventory; what exists lives in people's heads and scattered notes.

There's a list (Excel or a wiki), but everyone knows it's incomplete — mostly servers, with a lot missing.

The main item types (server, application, database) are mostly there; coverage thins out at the edges (SaaS, cloud).

Practically every production item is in there, including cloud and SaaS resources.

There are several parallel lists (monitoring, a spreadsheet, people's heads), and each one says something different.

There's a "main" list, but separate inventories live alongside it, and nobody reconciles them.

There's one primary source; other systems get synced to it manually.

There's a single accepted source of truth; other systems either pull from it or feed into it.

There are no rules; everyone enters whatever seems important at the time.

There are a few standard fields or columns, but filling them in is hit or miss.

There's a defined set of fields per item type, and we mostly stick to it.

There's a fixed data model (item types, required fields, naming convention), and new items have to conform to it.

Partially — written down or diagrammed for a few critical systems.

The main relationships (app→server, app→database) are recorded in a structured way.

Dependencies are systematically maintained, and we actually work from them during incidents and changes.

Typically never — or when something forces us to go digging.

After the fact, if we remember — days or weeks can go by between the change and the update.

It's part of the change routine ("it's not done until the inventory is updated"), but it depends on people following through.

It's built into the deploy or change process itself (a script, a checklist gate, an automatic update) — skipping it is harder than doing it.

We don't trust it; we'd rather check live (SSH, console) than take the list's word for it.

It's a fine starting point, but we verify before any important decision.

It's mostly reliable; surprises are rare.

It's the default source of truth; discrepancies are rare, and when they happen, we treat them as bugs and fix them.

They mostly don't, or it's random — a lot of new items never make it in, and old ones stay stuck in the list.

Manually, whenever someone happens to think of it.

It's a fixed step in the provisioning and decommissioning routine, recorded manually.

Automatically or semi-automatically (a provisioning script or discovery picks them up), with minimal manual work.

Anyone's guess — it was probably last accurate the day it was created.

A week behind at most; critical items are kept fresher than that.

Fresh to within a day or better, updated automatically — and you can see exactly when each item was last updated.

We run something occasionally (a network scan, a cloud export), but the results don't make it back in regularly.

Scheduled discovery runs against part of the environment, and the results go into the inventory.

Scheduled discovery covers most of the environment (servers, cloud, network), and it's the main source of updates.

No; there's nothing to compare, or nothing to compare it against.

Now and then (say, before an audit), we manually review what's different.

We occasionally run a reconciliation with a script or an export, and fix the discrepancies we find.

Reconciliation runs on a schedule, discrepancies turn into a list or an alert, and we act on them.

No; there's no central picture of what's running in the cloud or in SaaS.

There's a manually kept list, and it goes stale fast.

We periodically pull in the main cloud resources via API or export.

Cloud and SaaS items sync into the inventory automatically.

It would all have to be manual — which is exactly why it doesn't happen.

Mostly manual; a handful of exports or scripts help.

Mixed: a significant share of the data comes in automatically, and we handle the rest by hand.

Updates are mostly automatic; manual work is reserved for exceptions.