Name vs Device Name Best Practices?
We use KACE SMA for inventory/asset management and need to come up with a better naming convention for laptop names. Right now we use Name: which we manually type into KACE and it's a combination of Brand + serial number + user initials. The Device Name, which KACE automatically pulls from the laptop name, is also the same as the Name field. This has worked well for us until we had to start sending laptops off for warranty repairs. We usually take the hard drive out of the laptop going out for repair, put it in a loaner laptop and then give the loaner laptop to the person. We've run into the issue that KACE will at some point rename the Device Name and we end up with a mess in KACE and can't keep our inventory straight.
How do you all handle warranty repairs and hard drive swaps in KACE? What type of naming convention do you use?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Answers (1)
When we work with customers and KACE asset management we set up the link between the Inventory record and the Asset record on an additional field “Serial number” and then link inventory on BIOS Serial number to that field.
This means when a device checks in it creates the Inventory record, then creates an Asset named as the machine name and populates the serial number field.
If we play through your example so we have PC123 serial abc123y the inventory is called PC123, the asset is called PC123 and the serial field is populated abc123y.
If you change the harddrive, as you described, the BIOS serial stays the same. When the device checks in with the new hard drive the machine name may change to say PC124, as the name is in the OS.
So in that example, the inventory record becomes PC124, the asset record stays connected but is renamed to PC124 and the change is recorded in the asset history as the serial number is the same.
No additional or duplicate asset records.
