Asset Management Suite

Good %Greeting Time%,

Can anyone please tell me:

1. Why do I see some computers that show as 'Network Resources'? You can see an example in the screen shot below for the computer: JosePC which has two entries, however not all the computers I'm talking about have two entries
2. Is it possible to change the Asset Type to something other than 'Network Resource'? In the example screen shot below the ones that start with SEP... are all network IP phones, but I can't esaily change them

• How do I even tell what Connect Profile protocol type was used to discover them? Perhaps they are discoved as SNMP devices, but how do I tell?
• If they are snmp discovered devices, will I just need to change the Asset Classification ID, and does it mean I also need to rerun discovery task

 

Thanks in advance.

 

The connection profile will be given in Resource Manager. Inventory > Data Classes > PluggableProtocols > ProtocolMask > ConnectionProfileGUID. It will be easier if you can identify the GUIDs of your connection profiles in advance.

There's no way to change the resource type of an asset, but what I've done in the past is to use a report (or create a custom one if necessary), then save the data as .CSV.  Then I delete the records from the SMP and then import the CSV using the correct asset type.  It's not a perfect solution, but at least you'll get to keep some data. Just a word of warning, make sure to export any relevant asset data, because once it's deleted, it's gone.

hmm good lateral thinking stu!

is there a way to export every known property for an asset easily? as opposed to a custom report that might only have 10 fields e.g. make, model, ram, hdd, etc

seems a nasty way to do it though. i'm suprised it's not possible to simply right click on an assset and then assign it to any catagory i won't! for example i might create a catagory called rubbish, to enable me to easily view, or remove from views/reports etc

Thanks Andy.

it's annoying how Altiris creates two seperate entries though. It seems to have no idea that it's the same device!?

You could just delete the duplicate devices, the Network Discovery and Inventory is unlikely to have any important information that Agent based inventory has missed. And configure your Network Discovery tasks to avoid IP addresses with PCs on them. Maybe log it as a fault call with Symantec that the Asset Type is being discovered wrongly. But maybe look at the discovery info for the Network Resource first to see what info the decision has been based on.

 Same opinion with "andykn101". this was happe to me before i followed the step stated, it works. 

It's been ages since I posted this but the reason it shows duplicates is becasue it's discovered the name, but doesn't know anything about it and therefore assigns it as a 'Network Resource' (The lowest form of asset in Altiris - it basically means it has no idea wtf it is e.g. it can't authenticate to it but gets it's name or ip address from a scheduled discovery task)

It then subsequently has the Altiris Agent Installed, and knows it's a computer because of it, but because it keeps old information in there forever, the old Network Resource' record is never removed until I manually delete it.

This is one of Altiris's biggest sins - automatically classifying devices, and not letting me change the classification. oh such a simple fix in code, but so a huge problem for so many sites, and especially for noobs!

I have the follwoing irritating problem which is caused by this:

1. We import about 500 network devices from an Excel workbook, as 'Infrastructure Devieces' (we can't use snmp for about 6 differnet reasons)

2. The discovery tasks discover not the full list of 500 devices, but lets say about 100 of them. So now I have 100 duplicates that I haven't figured out how to deal with. If I delete them they will just come back on the next icmp discovery. Also it's not possible to 'merge' two different resouce types i.e Network Resource and an 'Infrastructure Device'

:(