Asset management using Cloud Asset Inventory

Cloud Asset Inventory plays a key role in security as it gives you the ability to view your assets in near real time and also to detect the associated changes to the asset. Previously, Cloud Asset Inventory was accessible either via the CLI or Security Command Center, but with recent changes, you can now access Cloud Asset Inventory via the Google Cloud console.

Cloud Asset Inventory is a metadata inventory service that lets you search, export, monitor, and analyze metadata related to supported Google Cloud assets. All metadata information related to an asset is presented on a timeline where you can view historical information (the past five weeks) to get insights into changes to an asset. Before we look at some use cases that Cloud Asset Inventory can help with, let’s understand some key concepts.

An asset is a Google Cloud resource or a policy object. Cloud Asset Inventory collects metadata about resources, such as for Compute...