Most IT asset management tools ship with a fixed set of fields. You get a hostname field. A serial number field. Maybe an IP address and a purchase date. And then somewhere around the third client onboarding, you hit the wall: the field you actually need — the firmware version, the management VLAN, the contracted SLA tier — isn’t there. You end up putting it in notes. Then a different technician puts the same thing in a different note format. Then six months later nobody can run a useful query because the data isn’t structured.
The problem isn’t that the tool doesn’t have enough fields. The problem is that someone else decided what fields matter — and they weren’t documenting your clients’ infrastructure.
Weavestream takes a different approach. Instead of giving you a fixed schema, it gives you a layout builder. You define what a “Server” record looks like. You define what a “Network Device” record looks like. You define what a “Software License” record looks like. Those layouts are then available across every client in your system.
What an Asset Layout Actually Is
An asset layout in Weavestream is a reusable form definition — a named template with a list of fields, each with a type and optional configuration. You create layouts in the admin panel and they’re immediately available when adding assets for any client.
Every layout has a name and a list of fields. You pick field types from a list of fifteen options, configure them, and arrange them in the order that makes sense for your workflow. That’s it. Creating a new layout for a type of asset you’ve never tracked before takes about two minutes.
The layouts are global — defined once, used everywhere. If you’re managing thirty clients, you don’t rebuild the “Firewall” layout thirty times. You define it once and every technician gets the same structured form when they’re documenting a firewall for any client.
Fifteen Field Types, Each Doing One Thing Well
The field type list in Weavestream covers almost everything you’d actually need when documenting IT infrastructure:
Text fields come in three flavours: single-line for short values like hostnames and model numbers, multi-line for longer free-text notes, and rich text for anything that needs formatting — tables, code blocks, or step-by-step notes embedded directly in the asset record.
Date and datetime fields have a specific superpower: when you enable expiry tracking, any date field shows up in the global expiration dashboard with colour-coded status. Set expiry tracking on your warranty date field and every overdue warranty across all clients appears in red. Set it on a support contract field and you get amber warnings as the renewal date approaches. This is covered in more detail in our expiration tracking post, but it’s worth noting here because it’s opt-in at the field level — you decide which date fields trigger expiry monitoring.
The IP address field type deserves a mention because it’s not just a text field with a label. It accepts IPv4 and IPv6 addresses with optional CIDR notation and serves as the groundwork for IPAM integration — the same IP address values that appear in asset records can be cross-referenced against your subnet allocations.
Dropdown and multiselect fields let you define controlled vocabularies. If you want to track operating system version as a dropdown rather than free text — so that you can actually filter by it later — you define the options once in the layout. There’s also a free-text “Other” escape hatch for values you didn’t anticipate.
The Field That Changes How You Think About Asset Relationships
The most powerful field type is the one that’s easiest to overlook: ASSET_REFERENCE.
An ASSET_REFERENCE field is a cross-link to another asset. When a technician fills in that field, they’re not typing a hostname — they’re selecting an actual asset record from Weavestream, creating a navigable link between the two.
This matters because infrastructure relationships are real. A virtual machine lives on a hypervisor host. A workstation is assigned to a user (who might be documented as an asset or a contact). A software license covers a specific set of machines. A UPS protects a specific rack of equipment. None of that context survives if the relationship is just a name typed into a notes field.
With ASSET_REFERENCE fields, those relationships are explicit. Click the hypervisor field on a VM record and you go directly to the hypervisor asset. The relationship is stored as a Relation record — queryable, auditable, and kept in sync if either asset is renamed.
For complex client environments, this turns your asset database from a list of records into a navigable map of infrastructure.
Credentials Live on the Asset
One other thing worth knowing: Weavestream lets you embed password records directly into an asset. The credentials for a server’s iLO interface, the local admin account on a switch, the API key for a cloud management console — they can all live on the asset record rather than floating in the general credential vault with no clear owner.
When the asset is archived, its embedded passwords archive with it. No orphaned credentials. No hunting through the vault for a password attached to hardware you decommissioned last quarter.
How Layouts Work Across Clients
Asset layouts are managed by super-admin users and shared across all tenants. Every client gets access to the same set of layouts. If you add a field to the “Workstation” layout, it shows up for all clients going forward — existing records aren’t affected, but new records (and edits to existing ones) can populate the new field.
You can rename a layout without breaking anything. You can reorder fields with drag-and-drop. And when a layout becomes obsolete — say, you had a specific layout for a type of appliance that’s been fully replaced — you can archive it. Archived layouts disappear from the creation picker but all historical records built against that layout remain intact.
A Practical Example: Documenting a Firewall
Here’s what a “Firewall” layout might look like for a typical MSP:
- Make — dropdown (Fortinet, Palo Alto, SonicWall, Cisco, pfSense, Other)
- Model — single-line text
- Firmware version — single-line text
- Management IP — IP address field
- Management URL — URL field
- Admin credential — embedded password record
- WAN 1 IP — IP address field
- WAN 2 IP — IP address field (optional)
- Support contract expiry — date field with expiry tracking enabled
- Notes — rich text
- Upstream ISP asset —
ASSET_REFERENCEto a “Network Provider” asset - Protected devices — multiselect or
ASSET_REFERENCE
That layout gives you structured, filterable data instead of free-form notes. Every technician documents firewalls the same way. You can look at the expiration dashboard and see at a glance which clients have support contracts coming up for renewal. You can follow the ASSET_REFERENCE to see which ISP circuit feeds the firewall.
You build it once. It works for every client.
The Bigger Picture
The custom layout system is what separates an IT asset database from an IT asset list. A list tells you what you have. A database tells you what you have, how it’s configured, what it’s connected to, when it expires, and which credentials secure it — all in a form that’s consistent across every client, every technician, and every onboarding.
For MSPs managing varied infrastructure across multiple clients, the alternative is usually a mix of spreadsheets, notes fields, and tribal knowledge. Weavestream’s layout builder is the tool for replacing that mix with something structured — without having to accept someone else’s opinion about what fields your infrastructure needs.
You can explore the asset management reference at docs.weavestream.io/features/assets and the full feature set at docs.weavestream.io/features.