KACE Asset Management
I'm pretty new to KACE and I was wondering if there was a way to automate certain operations. Is it possible to have the asset list autopopulate itself with specific information from the inventory list?
For example, I have a bunch of computers in both my asset list and inventory list, but the ones in my asset list don't have location information. Is it possible to automate a process such that the computers within my asset list will grab the location information from their counterparts within my inventory list so that I can perform a view by location action and only have those computers at specific locations appear?
Is it also possible to do this action but instead grab the Dell Service Tag (not necessarily to search but just to add to the assets)?
Answers (3)
I started to answer this and then it got long but really useful so i created this blog post http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/updating-an-asset-field-with-a-smart-label-on-every-inventory
You said auto-populate but another thing you could do is a manual process. Create a report to export the data (csv format) from MACHINE and then import that into assets mapping the fields.
I believe most of your questions are answered by the Dell KACE documentation available here: http://www.kace.com/support/resources/documentation
As a quick overview, Inventory management is used for data collected via agents, and is automatically updated, as well as recorded under Asset management. Asset management is used to manually track devices that cannot install the agent such as phones, printers, networking devices, software licenses, etc.
To extrapolate on your question, it sounds like you want to track specific computers by location. This is best done in Inventory management using smart labels (groups) that displays workstations based on defined criteria that will automatically update. Regarding your last question, you can generate a report that gathers the service tag on all of your computers.
Most of your questions are directly answered performing a bit of weekend reading. The documentation isn't that long, and you can generally skip sections that don't concern your immediate interest/goals with KACE.
Location isn't one of the things that can be linked between inventory and asset module, unfortunately. You could conceivably create a rule in the service desk that could do this, however. Rules in the service desk have the ability to change database tables in any part of the K1000, so you can theoretically create a rule that looks for assets without a location and then run an update statement on them that would set the location based on a matching serial number.
