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 shared by a customer.

Background:

The customer reported something that he noticed recently regarding keeping inventory information for their monitors:

We collect monitor inventory for all our client machines. However, we noticed that when our users work from home and inventory runs, we lose the office monitor inventory even though the users have a monitor on their desks in the office.

Few more details:

1. When you said "when....inventory runs we lose the monitor inventory", do you mean that the "office" monitor is overwritten and only the "home" monitor remains? or "office" and "home" monitor inventory entries are gone?

--Customer: If I user is working with no external monitor Just a laptop then the inventory is blank: “No Monitor”

2. When you are referring to "office" monitor inventory and discarding "home" monitor inventory or keeping both as separate entries in the database that doesn't overwrite each other?

--Customer: Yes, the Office monitor should be the one staying as their valid inventory reference.

Request:

Is there a way to keep this information?

Environment

ITMS 8.5, 8.6

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. A Customer 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.
   
   

2. One more idea - 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:

   
   
   
   

Additional things to consider:

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

We would suggest here thinking about using Asset Management Solution for handling this type of request as an additional option.
Asset management solution allows creation of resources of different type (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.
-------------------------------------------------------
Information below is just an idea and has not been tested by our team. Just thoughts on where to look and what may be useful in this case :
1 - theoretically they may 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.