Google Cloud Asset Inventory
Software asset management (SAM) tools
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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Completely free
Free Trial unavailable
Free version
Small
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- Information technology and software
- Banking and insurance
- Media and communications
What is Google Cloud Asset Inventory
Google Cloud Asset Inventory is a Google Cloud service that provides a centralized inventory of Google Cloud resources and their metadata, including configuration history and IAM policies. It is used by cloud operations, security, and compliance teams to discover assets, track changes, and support governance reporting across projects, folders, and organizations. The service integrates with Google Cloud logging, monitoring, and policy tooling and exposes APIs for search, export, and analysis. It focuses on Google Cloud resource visibility rather than cross-vendor software license management.
Native Google Cloud coverage
It inventories a broad set of Google Cloud resource types and associated metadata, including IAM policies, across organization hierarchies. This supports consistent asset discovery without deploying third-party agents. It fits teams that primarily need authoritative visibility into Google Cloud assets. It also reduces data reconciliation work compared with tools that rely on multiple collectors for the same cloud.
Change history and governance
It provides historical views of asset configuration and policy changes, which helps with audit trails and incident investigations. Teams can use this to understand when a resource changed and what the prior state was. This is useful for compliance evidence and drift detection workflows. The history capability is more aligned to cloud governance than traditional on-prem asset registers.
APIs and export integration
It offers APIs to search assets and export inventory data for analysis and reporting. Exports can be used to feed data warehouses, security analytics, or custom CMDB/SAM processes. This supports automation and integration with internal tooling. It is well-suited when teams want programmatic access rather than a standalone asset management UI.
Not full SAM functionality
It does not provide end-to-end software license management, contract tracking, or optimization workflows typical of dedicated SAM platforms. It focuses on cloud resource inventory rather than application spend, renewals, and entitlement reconciliation. Organizations needing comprehensive SaaS discovery and license governance will likely require additional tooling. This can create gaps for non-cloud software asset management requirements.
Google Cloud–centric scope
Its inventory is primarily limited to Google Cloud resources and does not natively serve as a unified inventory across multiple cloud providers and on-prem environments. Multi-cloud organizations may need separate inventories and normalization processes. This increases integration effort for enterprise-wide asset reporting. It is less suitable as a single source of truth for heterogeneous estates.
Requires engineering for reporting
Many use cases depend on configuring exports, writing queries, and building dashboards in other systems rather than using a dedicated asset management interface. This can increase time-to-value for teams without strong cloud engineering or data skills. Operational workflows (e.g., lifecycle, assignment, procurement) are not core features. As a result, it may complement rather than replace purpose-built asset management tools.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0.00 (All use free of charge) | Cloud Asset Inventory usage is free. Customers are responsible for any costs associated with storing data Cloud Asset Inventory produces (for example, data written to Cloud Storage buckets). See official pricing page for details. |
Seller details
Google LLC
Mountain View, CA, USA
1998
Subsidiary
https://cloud.google.com/deep-learning-vm
https://x.com/googlecloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/google/
