KACE Product Support

That's like asking how someone built the engine in a car. I suppose I could give you a 10,000 foot overview. We've got several assets setup with custom fields. We're tracking our desktops, laptops, and servers as machine assets, and we're also tracking software licensing using assets. We've got IP scanning setup to detect specific ports to find our thin client devices, and I'm doing something similar to find Symbol warehouse scanners. I'm working on setting up custom help desk rules to maintain the thin client and symbol assets (along with user assets based on the LDAP imports) automatically by adding new records, updating existing records, and removing stale records. I'll be posting my work in a thread in this forum when I'm done. Although, it will only work if you've also got the help desk module.

I agree, but I am looking around to see what other people are tracking with the assets module.

We are currently trying to build an actual working scheme. We have setup tracking for are computers by BIOS serial number... we have had some problems with it though. about 8 computers the WMI is reporting the serial number wrong (random string of characters). Also when we reimage a computer sometimes the Kbox will create a new record rather than updating the current. It;s a bug I am working with support on/

then there is when we reimage Kbox doesn’t update the asset record computer name… Has anyone found a way around this? I'm guessing it would be a helpdesk rule, the computer name doesn't changed in the assets when I reimage a computer... The asset itself might get updated with new information but it’s not that helpful. IE computer x with sn jjj gets reimaged… renamed pc y Kbox will update asset record jjj with the software and stuff but not the new name

On another note.

We have been tracking some software licenses, and purchase information but a lot of the stuff we get here is network licenses... So we would like to watch how many computers get the software installed compared to the amount of licenses... but if we are way over we are still technically in the green.

Or.

Does anyone take advantage of the metering? if so how do you manage multiple versions of software? we are running some software here that we might be using 3 version... yet they all use the same process name so Kbox cant sort it.

And.

We have been talking here how we want to track warranty end dates in Kbox… we can’t import the information that we have because the way that assets work (I have also been through this with support). Has anyone done this successfully?


Just some discussion ideas.

I haven't had the serial number problem at all. I wish I could help with your imaging questions, but we don't have a 2000 box (yet, anyway). We're still deploying images with MDT and DVDs.

It is easy to setup software license tracking based on the installation of software, but metering would have to be used for concurrent licensing. Virtual Kontainers would work as well, and probably better than metering since, to my knowledge, metering is only process specific. So, it cannot determine which version is running. You should be able to import anything into assets as long as the source file is CSV with your columns setup as you'd like field data imported. Are you talking about updating existing assets with an import? I'm not sure if that is possible, but something could definitely be done with custom help desk rules after a new import to merge new data with the old. This requires the help desk module, though.

Yeah, updating current data, or even adding new data.