The word asset means different things in different tools. In Safeguard, the pages and docs use it for the software things your organization builds, buys or consumes. This post covers that meaning. Safeguard Design is the companion for turning that asset and security data into visuals people can share: diagrams of the estate, posters and slides for a review. This post covers the assets themselves, which is where every good visual starts.
What it is
The Asset Discovery page says it will automatically discover every repository, container, package, SBOM, AI model and vendor dependency in your software estate. Every discovered asset is a node in a typed graph. The classes listed are source repositories, container images, packages, AI models, SBOMs, vendors and runtime workloads.
Each asset gets four fields.
- Owner: inferred from Git CODEOWNERS, container labels, or assigned by hand.
- Business unit: mapped from repository topic tags, cloud account or namespace.
- Environment: production, staging, dev or ephemeral.
- Sensitivity: customer data, regulated (FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI), public or internal.
How to use it
There are three ways to connect. Agentless integrations link your Git provider, registries, cloud accounts and model registries with OAuth or IAM roles. Lightweight agents and SBOM ingestion are the other two. The docs send you to the Integrations page for the connector matrix.
After that, the dashboards use the same asset data. The analytics docs mention total assets, SBOM coverage and ownership coverage on the Program Overview, a top ten list of the most affected assets, and a shadow asset count with its trend.
A useful first pass is to look for assets with no owner. An unowned repository has nobody to receive an alert about it.
What the docs say is missing
The Asset Discovery docs state that the version one REST endpoints are not yet available and that no CLI command lists assets or queries the graph. They also do not describe a page named Assets, so use the dashboard for now.
Try it yourself
Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.
Design and assets together
A diagram of your supply chain is only as good as the inventory behind it. Because every asset has an owner, an environment and a sensitivity, a visual built from the asset graph can answer the questions people ask in a review: who owns this, is it in production, and does it hold customer data. Build the inventory first, then design from it.
Example: a platform lead exports the view of production assets that hold customer data, and uses it as the first slide of a quarterly risk review.
Quick check
Where does an asset's owner come from?
It is inferred from Git CODEOWNERS, container labels, or assigned manually.
Can you list assets from the CLI today?
The docs say there is no CLI command for listing assets or querying the asset graph.
