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Modify Asset Status Using Helpdesk Incidents 

Jun 03, 2009 11:47 AM

For about three years now we have been using the Altiris Helpdesk Solution. All in all I have become more and more impressed with the types of things it can do. The ability to create workflows within the product has turned out to be very handy, even without Workflow Solution itself.

About a year ago, after nearly two years of planning, we migrated from our home grown asset system to Altiris' Asset Management Solution. As you can imagine there have been some growing pains. The integration however has proved to be invaluable. That integration between the two solutions is providing us with many more opportunities than we originally envisioned.

In our organization we have a team of people who, among other things, are responsible for keeping our asset information up to date. For security reasons they are the only ones who have been able to modify an asset directly. By doing this it has created somewhat of a time drain on much of the simple stuff we think many people should be able to do, such as modifying an asset. However, using Notification policies on the NS it is possible to modify the status of the assets associated to those tickets automatically.

Step 1. Define a distinct way to mark your ticket.

There are a number of ways to mark a ticket specifically for a function. You can use a quick incident with a specific title, but a manually creating second ticket to retire an asset seems to be a hassle. You could use an Incident Rule to create a new ticket and mark the ticket there, though you would still have to mark the first one uniquely. Manually setting something like a Title, Comment, or even External ID could be undesirable, because those are often subject to typos.

What I would personally suggest for this solution is a Task. It will automatically set the information on the incident uniformly. That task can set just about anything on the incident, but to limit error I used a custom "Action" of "RetireMe". Actions are not something that you can easily modify from the incident and it therefore lends itself to being more stable and less likely to be accidentally invoked.

Step 2. Write a report to collect your marked tickets.

The tricky part to writing this report is you may initially find yourself just sticking to everything within the HD_workitem_detail_view table, because all your target columns are listed in this table; Managed Object Name, Incident #, Title, Action, and even Managed Object Guid. However, in order to modify your true target, the asset itself, you need to join to that item's record. Below is the SQL I used when creating my report.

Select I.Guid,
I.name AS 'Name',
hd.workitem_number AS 'Incident',
hd.workitem_title AS 'Title',
hd.workitem_action As 'Action'
FROM Item I
JOIN HD_workitem_detail_view HD ON I.Guid = HD.managed_object_resource_guid
WHERE hd.Workitem_action = 'RetireMe'
AND (DATEDIFF(day, GETDATE(), hd.[workitem_modified_on]) = 0)

You will notice that I also chose to select tickets modified today. That is because we have to create an interval to run these Notifications on and if an Asset is "un-retired" we will not want the policy setting it back once we have reused the asset.

Step 3. Make a new Notification Policy.

This is perhaps the easiest part of the whole process. By going to your "Tasks" tab in the NS 6 console you can find a location then right-click and select "New" > "Notification Policy". Give your policy a good name and description then from "Source" select "Report" and browse to the report.

Make sure to schedule it to occur once a day. I would recommend doing it after the end of the day so all of the changes get done at once.

The simply add the "Set Asset Status" Action and modify the action to be the appropriate status. "Retired" is what we've selected for our example.

Step 4. Test it out and Tweak

Next make the modification to an incident and test it out. While doing this I recommend modifying your report to also include just one or two specific incident numbers. Just to prevent accidents.

After you have done enough testing I would recommend tweaking it to match your specific needs. For example, we decided that daily was good enough for us to run this process, but perhaps you want to do it multiple times a day. All you need to do is modify the last line of your report to something like this:

AND (DATEDIFF(hour, GETDATE(), hd.[workitem_modified_on]) <= 4) 

Then update your policy to run every four hours instead of once a day.

Maybe you have decided that while you do not mind expanding who can modify the status of an asset you do not want it to be everyone. That's where you can go back and limit who sees the task you have configured. To do that, just follow the instructions on this "Blog" entry for more information.

Helpdesk Tasks Just for You

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Comments

Jun 03, 2009 04:16 PM

Sure, we've got approximately 4,500 computers we manage with a small team that handle the tracking of assets.  A couple guys handle ordering and stock levels with really one person full time dedicated to tracking assets and performing reconciliation with the database.  if you have any specific questions just drop me a PM or e-mail and I'll be happy to answer them.

Jun 03, 2009 04:00 PM

Very nice article, thank you.

Just a side asset mgmt question (because we are struggling with who the players in our IT Asset Mgmt process should be and how to make it it work day-to-day):

Are you at liberty to describe how big your organization is and who is responsible for asset mgmt and how your process works?

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