In the Age of AI, Trusted Infrastructure Data Isn’t Optional

For a long time, it was okay to have a broken configuration management database (CMDB). I don’t mean anyone was happy about it. I mean the cost of being wrong was something most organizations could absorb. A configuration item was stale, a record was orphaned, a cloud asset spun up and disappeared before anyone wrote it down, and the consequence was a slower change window or an awkward audit. Annoying, but survivable. Teams built their working lives around quietly compensating for data they knew they couldn’t fully trust.

That era is ending. When you put AI and AgenticOps on top of your infrastructure data, you stop being the safety net. The system acts on what it’s told is true. If the underlying picture is incomplete, outdated or scattered across disconnected tools, AI won’t catch the mistake the way a seasoned operator would. It makes the mistake faster, at greater scale and with more confidence. The data problems we’ve lived with for years suddenly carry a much higher price.

This is the shift behind the next step we’re taking with Infoblox Universal Asset Insights™. Universal Asset Insights helps organizations improve CMDB accuracy, drive more effective operations and build a trusted data foundation for AI and AgenticOps.

Discovery Is Only the First Problem

Almost everyone has a discovery tool, yet few are confident in the picture it produces. Part of the reason is that discovery is harder than it looks: scan-based tools miss what they were never pointed at, and in our own customer data, organizations routinely find around 40 percent more assets than they thought they had once they move beyond a traditional scanner, according to an ESG report.¹

But even a complete, current picture isn’t the finish line. The data also has to be trusted, validated and usable by the teams and systems that depend on it. In recent EMA research on AI-driven network operations, only 44 percent of organizations said they were confident that the quality of their network data could support AI-driven initiatives,² even as many of those same organizations actively invest in AI and agentic workflows. The harder work is making that intelligence authoritative and keeping it that way as your environment changes.

Think of It Like Your GPS

Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to.

Your car’s GPS is only as good as its map. The routing engine can be brilliant, but if a road is missing, a street name is wrong or a new neighborhood was never added, the GPS will confidently send you the wrong way. The problem isn’t the navigation system. It’s the map data underneath it.

That’s exactly what’s happening with AI inside a lot of organizations right now. The models are capable, but they’re reasoning over a map of the infrastructure that’s full of gaps, duplicates and stale records. Feed an agent a bad map and it won’t hesitate—it will just be wrong with conviction. Trustworthy data is the prerequisite for everything you want to do with AI on top of your infrastructure.

Infoblox Universal Asset Insights: Discovery + Inventory + Insights

Universal Asset Insights delivers a complete visibility solution built on three pillars—Discovery, Inventory and Insights—all rooted in the DNS and DHCP signals that every connected asset depends on. We are adding new capabilities to build a trusted data foundation for AI, AgenticOps, CMDB accuracy and more effective operations.

Discovery: Find every asset. Universal Asset Insights continuously discovers assets across cloud, on-premises, IoT/OT, remote and unmanaged environments. Because our DNS and DHCP foundation sees virtually everything operational, we surface the shadow IT, unmanaged devices and short-lived cloud assets that scanners routinely miss. This release widens that net considerably:

• Expanded third-party API integrations bring the total to 40+ across cloud, networking, security, endpoint, IoT/OT, collaboration and infrastructure platforms—including new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) discovery alongside the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud support customers already rely on.
• Native IoT discovery finds unmanaged and previously unseen IoT/OT devices using both active probing and passive DNS and network traffic analysis.
• Intelligent discovery source recommendations continuously analyze DNS query traffic to detect infrastructure already active in your environment. When Universal Asset Insights spots a connected platform like Juniper Mist, Meraki or CrowdStrike, a prepopulated discovery source appears in the console, ready for an administrator to connect in a few clicks.

Inventory: Know what each asset is. Discovery alone isn’t enough. Universal Asset Insights correlates, deduplicates, enriches and continuously validates data across those sources into a single, authoritative inventory. Two new capabilities extend that inventory out to the systems that depend on it:

• The new ServiceNow Graph Connector for Universal Asset Insights adds bidirectional CMDB synchronization, automatically updating missing, stale or incomplete configuration items so the CMDB reflects what’s actually present and active.
• Integration with the Infoblox Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server connects third-party AI assistants, agents and applications directly to that inventory through a standard interface with no custom integration work required.

Insights: Drive operational outcomes. Visibility only matters when teams can act on it, and each team needs something different: NetOps tracks IP conflicts and zombie assets, SecOps wants richer asset context and IT and compliance need continuous CMDB validation. Two new capabilities make that intelligence easier to reach:

• Natural language query lets anyone talk to their infrastructure in plain language. Asset visibility becomes accessible to the whole team, not just the few people who know how to build structured queries.
• Custom dashboards let each team build the role-specific view of infrastructure, risk and operational data that matters to them, instead of fighting a one-size-fits-all interface. NetOps, SecOps, CloudOps and IT each get the signal relevant to their work.

A Foundation Your Agents Can Build On

So how do you put that trusted data to work in your own agentic workflows? It comes down to where you’re building. We support both paths:

• Building on Infoblox directly? The Infoblox MCP Server lets you ground your own agents in Universal Asset Insights’ authoritative inventory.
• Building on top of your CMDB? The ServiceNow Graph Connector keeps that CMDB continuously enriched and validated, so the agents reasoning over ServiceNow work from network truth instead of drifting records.

Where to Start

These new capabilities will be generally available on a rolling basis beginning in July 2026, with additional enhancements through late August 2026. The Infoblox MCP Server integration is available to early access customers now. If you’re already a customer, your account team can show you what’s new. If you’re not, start a trial and point Universal Asset Insights at your own environment. You’ll likely find more than you expected.

It used to be okay to have a broken CMDB. In the age of AI, it isn’t. The teams that get ahead won’t be the ones with the most ambitious AI plans. They’ll be the ones whose AI is working from infrastructure data they can actually trust.

Footnotes

1. ESG Research Report: Security Hygiene and Posture Management. Oltsik, Jon. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). 2022.
2. AI-Driven NetOps: How Enterprises are Embracing Intelligent Network Management Solutions. Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). January 2026.