Good trustworthy data is one of the 7 key ingredients to successful SAM, how do you ensure you are capturing all of your devices in your SAM system/ calculations?
Great question, and for this you need to workout your inventory percentage coverage. Let me put my HAM hat on for a second as this is related.
Firstly, you need to establish all of your inventory sources for hardware that contain software. If you have Cloud and SaaS, this should also include any Cloud instances and SaaS portals.
Next, get inventory reports from all of those sources - using your ITAM technology as the reference point.
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What Assets are not reporting in your ITAM Tool? What is their originating inventory source and can you either run the ITAM client on it or create an API to link the two technologies together?
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What Cloud instances are not reporting? Same approach as above - can you get them in your ITAM tool or link to the existing technology?
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Finally, what SaaS licenses are you currently not tracking, but have licenses and active users/instances for?
I always do the overall matrix initially to show the coverage within the ITAM tool vs the ITAM ecosystem. That way you can determine what percentage of your estate is covered. If it’s 90%+ you’re on your way!
If it’s less than 90%, you need to do a bit of work!
In the meantime, using all the other inventory sources you can identify your compliance position and also understand usage for cost savings/cash savings etc.
Let me know if that doesn’t make sense and I’ll try and re-phrase! 
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Tricky, all of what SAMBeast says. You need a parallel activity for inventory gap analysis that looks not only at all the artefacts that could be a device, but have a proof of life weighting system that qualifies if a device is a computer or not:
last inventoried date, last pinged date, how many data sources report this device, what type of data source reports this device (vCenter, SCCM).
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