Asset Management - Autopopulation of fields based on computer inventory
I just got back from the KACE Konference and I could have sworn it was possible to have asset information autopopulated from devices known to KACE with the agent installed. For example I would like to automatically pull information like Manufacturer, Model, Chassis type and maybe some other data that KACE already has in it's inventory. I set the Mapped Inventory Field to BIOS Serial Number and the Matching Asset Field to Serial Number but that is all I could do.
Answers (2)
You can write a custom help desk rule to pull data from inventory and use the result to update assets.
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Any details on how I could do that effectively? Would love to automatically populate information KACE inventories such as manufacturers and model numbers at the very least. I am in the process of setting up my asset types and then I am going to move to the help desk area to set up some queues. - bwilkerson 12 years ago
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The first step would be to determine the Inventory fields you want to pull from, and then the Asset fields that you want to populate. From there, you would want to write a Select query (same idea as a SQL Report on the K1000) that targets those Inventory fields, and then a corresponding Update query that will take the data returned by the Select query and write it to the corresponding Assets fields.
Since (custom) Asset fields are different on everyone's K1000, it would require doing a little legwork to figure out the field names (and also possibly require creating new fields in Assets to hold the proper data, if they aren't already present).
Also, with ticket rules comes pretty decent risk of messing things up (speaking with experience here... thank goodness for backups!), so at the very least you would want to have a solid backup regimen in place and (ideally, though not absolutely necessary) a second K1000 can extremely helpful for testing (wish I had one!).
Here's some KBs on ticket rules, in case you are new to them:
http://www.kace.com/support/resources/kb/article/Precautions-when-creating-ticket-rules
http://www.kace.com/support/resources/kb/article/What-Are-Ticket-Rules?action=artikel&cat=&id=965&artlang=en
http://www.kace.com/support/resources/kb/article/Creating-Testing-and-Troubleshooting-Helpdesk-Ticket-Rules
Hope that helps!
John - jverbosk 12 years ago
That is all you can automatically populate. You can import there other informaiton by creating a report as a CSV file and then do an Asset Import but Inventory and Computer asset only link via one of those Matching Fields.
Those matching fields under computer asset as used as, for the lack of a better term, primary keys to associate whats is in inventory to the computer asset. History, changes are then stored for the asset thorugh its life cycle. Anything else is imported in.
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Interesting... I thought you could use SQL commands like a custom inventory field to populate the data. Maybe I misunderstood. - bwilkerson 12 years ago
