Assigning an Asset to a Location...

[Migration User]

Using NS7 with Asset Management

Aside from manually assigning an Asset to a Location, is there an automated or best practice method? Say for computers, is there a way to have altiris assign the location based of the primary user or subnet. Seems like Primary user is more static for a location, but how do you get the location information to populate into the Asset automatically?

Any ideas or methods you use would be greatly appreciated. This is basically the first step into tying Altiris to our fixed assets software.

[Migration User]

You've got a few options to help you with that.  The one that would best suit your environment might vary.  I would ask what your primary purpose for location is before going forward.  In the end ours turned out to be for Insurance purposes so we went with the Subnet as the determination of our "Location" assignment.  I'm more familiar with Connectors so I ended up using that method to assist me, though I'd imagine CMDB rules would work as well.

[Migration User]

We want to create a report for Accounting to use for fixed assets/property taxes. So this would include computername, barcode, sevice tag/SN, and location.

Thanks!

[Migration User]

1.  Clone the General Asset Report (Service and Asset Management
      > Assets > General Asset Report). 
2.  Edit it (button in upper right corner)
3.  Add the two lines that are outlined in the screen shot below.

Use the Results tab to check that you didn't introduce any typos.  In your copy of the report you might want to rearrange the column order and/or drop columns that you don't want to display.  If you get errors use the Resolved Query tab to get a clue what isn't right.

Save Changes and you are ready to go. 

Good luck,

Sandy

[Migration User]

Appreciate the thorough instructions!!

This does add Location to the General Asset report so that worked fine. But I don't think there is actually any Location data (or any data at all) to bring across into this report. The General Asset report doesn't show any Location info other than what I manually assigned (as a test). So to me it's like Inventory hasn't updated the Asset. I'm guessing this because all that shows up is the Asset name (computername for computers) and is missing everything else. There are about 5 computers that show the model, service tag, and a couple other details. These items happen to be the original computers I used to test CMS. I'm wondering if there is a Scheduled task that dumps Inventory into Assets??? Maybe it hasn't ran or hasn't ran since I moved all the clients to the new server?

So, what you gave me is good info and I will be using that trick in my reports. But once I can get the asset info to populate......

[Migration User]

There are some nice automations that come with the system but are a bit buried.

1.  Assign Computer Ownership to the Primary User
2.  Inventory to Asset Synchronization (ie Manufacturer, Model, and Serial Number)
3.  Update Network Resource Location

On this last one you need to assign subnets to locations.  This is done by editing a Location.


The three tasks listed above are found under Manage > Jobs and Tasks > System Jobs and Tasks > Service and Asset Management > CMDB.

Sandy

[Migration User]

That was it, I didn't have any Schedules setup.... Thank you!!!

As a sidenote, I really enjoy the articles you've put out there. Thanks so much for your detail and hard work on providing us all valuable information.

Thanks again!!

[Migration User]

I appreciate hearing my postings are helping people.

Your comment spark me to include information from this discussion into the Asset Manager Workshop Using Altiris Asset Management Suite 7 that I am writing.

Sandy