Selective ITAM/ITCM reconciliation

Products

• CA IT Asset Manager Asset Portfolio Management

Issue/Introduction

Is there a way to separate the reconciliation between our Windows and Unix/Linux devices as Unix OS devices are not being reconciled in a consistent manner, and thus overwriting OS when reconciliation is performed.

Environment

Release : 17.3

Component : ARGIS (WEB VERSION)

Resolution

Assets are all being processed equally as far as reconciliation goes.  It is not possible to create a condition that will prevent reconciliation from taking place for a specific asset.  One can leave out the Operating System field from reconciliation, preventing an incoming entry from overwriting the ITAM Operating System field, but this would impact all such assets and not just Unix/Linux based devices.  

The rules are meant to match a select number of ITAM fields, such as Host Name or Serial Number to another matching field on the ITCM side.  It isn't possible to create a rule that names the "Operating System" field in ITAM and matches to a specific string pattern, such as "%Windows%" as part of the rule criteria.  This is because the "Operating System" field in ITAM is not used as part of the Reconciliation rules functionality to match up an asset.

One could change a given entry on ITAM that should not be subject to reconciliation in order to foil the reconciliation rules.  Example:  change the ITAM entry's host name to avoid matching the entry up if the reconciliation rules compare the host name for matching.  However, this would be a manual activity and may cause confusion for end users.  Similarly, one could also tweak the content being brought in by ITCM into ITAM for reconciliation, but this is something that needs to be pursued separately with ITCM.