How do you run a 30-day CAASM proof of concept?

How do you scope it?

Choose a slice you know well enough to check: one office, one business unit, one cloud account plus its SaaS apps. Before you connect anything, write down what you expect: how many laptops, how many servers, which ones you know lack an EDR agent, which cloud workloads are not in the CMDB. That list is your answer key.

Use the same sources for every product, with read-only credentials, so the comparison is fair.

Days 1 to 10: connect and count

Connect the sources and let each product finish its first collection. Then compare its counts with your answer key and with each source's own count. Write down where the product's number differs and why. Check how long setup took, who had to grant which permissions, and whether the product needed an appliance, an agent or only API access. Axonius, for example, offers hosted SaaS or self-managed deployment on-premises or in your own cloud, and Device42 runs as a customer-hosted virtual appliance with at least one Remote Collector.

Days 11 to 20: ask the gap questions

Run the coverage questions that matter to you: devices without an EDR agent, servers missing from the CMDB, accounts with no owner, SaaS apps nobody approved. Check a sample of the answers by hand. Look at merged records closely: does the product show which sources contributed to each record, and does it explain why two records were merged?

Days 21 to 30: turn answers into work

Take three real gaps and push them through to a fix: a ticket to the right team, a CMDB update, an automated action. Note what needed manual steps. Ask for a written statement of what the product will write back to other systems and with what approval.

What should you ask about price?

Ask before day 1. Some vendors publish prices or a pricing basis on the pages we read: runZero states its Platform starts at $5,000, JupiterOne publishes tiers from $25,000 a year, Lansweeper publishes Starter and Pro prices (from €270 and €474 a month, billed annually, as shown to us), Axonius shows a starting rate of $8.55 per correlated device at its 15,000 to 24,999 tier, and Microsoft Defender EASM bills by billable assets after a 30-day trial. Others quote through sales or list only an AWS Marketplace price. Either way, ask which unit the price is based on (assets, devices, data points) and what happens when your count grows. Axonius, for example, counts a device seen by several tools once.

How do you judge the result?

Three scores of your own: gaps found against your answer key, quality of merged records on your sample, and effort to turn an answer into a fix. A product that finds fewer gaps but explains each one may serve you better than one with a larger number you cannot check.

What next?

Use the asset census to prepare questions for each vendor on your shortlist, and the finder to decide which approach the proof of concept should test first.