Keeping Inventory for Monitors while in a mixed environment

Products

• IT Management Suite
• Inventory Solution

Issue/Introduction

The following article is based on a Use-case request.

Background:

It was reported that something noticed in regards to keeping inventory information for monitors is:

Monitor inventory is collected for all client machines. However, it's been noticed that when users work from home and inventory runs, the office monitor inventory is lost even though the users have a monitor on their desks in the office.

More details:

1. If a user is working from home on their laptop with no external monitors (their laptop at work connects to monitors), the inventory is blank: “No Monitor”
2. The request is that the office monitor configuration is requested to be kept and not the home monitor (no externally attached monitors) configuration as the valid inventory reference.

Request:

Is there a way to keep the office monitor inventory information?

Environment

ITMS 8.5, 8.6, 8.7

Cause

The fact that "office" monitors disappear from inventory dataclass as soon as an inventory scan is executed on the device without a monitor is by design. Inventory collects actual information. Inventory data collected from devices previously is overridden by newly collected actual data.

Resolution

There are few ideas that you could try as a way to utilize the current inventory collection design:

1. The ITMS Administrator may want to enable "history" for Desktop Monitor Inventory dataclass under Settings > Notification Server > Resource and Data Class Settings > Resource History. This may keep information about changes in dataclass. Then historical data may be taken from SQL as part of a custom report. i.e. for "Desktop Monitor" from "InvHist_HW_Desktop_Monitor" table as seen below:
   
   

2. One more idea might be to create a Client job, that could run Inventory task based on conditions, i.e. execute "get client IP configuration" and then run "Gather Inventory" task only if output of "get client IP configuration" contains Office network evidences as shown here:

   

Additional things to consider:

From the issue's description, it seems that you would like to have a list of "office" monitors as assets. The following discussion is a customization so Symantec Support can't provide detailed steps or implementation steps.

You could consider using Asset Management Solution for handling this type of request as an additional option. Asset Management Solution allows creation of resources of different types (i.e. Monitor, Phone, etc.) and associates a resource with users or other resources, managing state of resources (i.e. Active, Retired, etc.). Maybe these capabilities are something that is needed in this case.
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Information below is just an idea and has not been tested by Symantec Support. Just thoughts on where to look and what may be useful in this case :

1. Theoretically you might use Data Connector functionality to create Asset resources based on inventory data. Data Connector allows creating a resource taking CSV file as data source. CVS may be created based on reported inventory data from computers connected to office monitors.
2. Theoretically Custom Inventory functionality allows generating NSE with required data. NSE may be generated so that it will create a new Monitor resource with all required data. But custom inventory script need to be tuned to generate proper NSE. Also, custom inventory script may have a condition that somehow identifies if the laptop is in office or outside of office and send inventory only from office.