Administration > Settings > Provance Hardware Administration Settings
The following hardware administrative settings are available:
Hardware asset settings
Hardware workflow setting
The Hardware Administration Settings form permits you to change the behavior of hardware asset creation with the following options:
Allow duplicate asset tags: Set this option to permit the creation of hardware assets with identical asset tag IDs.
Allow duplicate serial numbers: Set this option to permit the creation of hardware assets with identical serial numbers.
Automatically generate the Asset Name field: By default the Asset Name is automatically maintained by the management pack using a combination of the asset tag and the model. Deselect this option to maintain the Asset Name manually using your own nomenclature. The Asset Name field is used in an Advanced Search, so using your own nomenclature could make it easier to find assets. When you deselect this option the Asset Name field on a hardware asset becomes editable and mandatory. If you subsequently turn the option back on, any manually entered values will be overwritten with automatically generated values.
NOTE:
If you are using the Create Multiple Hardware Assets task and this option is deselected, their asset names will be automatically generated so as not to create assets with blank names.
The purpose of the Hardware Workflow Setting is to see all the incidents that have been opened for a hardware asset. Unless you manually relate a hardware asset to an incident, or create an incident from a hardware asset, incidents are not visible directly from the asset. The workflow setting automatically establishes a relationship between a hardware asset and an incident, through the CI linked to the asset. A relationship must already exist between the hardware asset and the CI (from the hardware asset form). The incidents appear on the Related Items tab of the hardware asset, under Work items affecting this configuration item. Incidents are not added to any of the hardware asset’s related CIs; only the hardware asset benefits from the workflow.
The workflow runs whenever there are updates to existing hardware assets and incidents, as well as when new assets or incidents are added.
While the primary purpose of this option is to relate incidents to hardware assets, the workflow actually establishes a relationship for all types of work items opened for a hardware asset. Therefore, if you open a change request, a problem and an activity work item for a CI, their related hardware assets will have those work items added to the Related Items tab.
NOTES:
A duplicate work item is made for the hardware asset under the incident, so if you delete the hardware asset the incident report will still contain the hardware asset.
The Allow duplicate asset tags and serial numbers settings will have an impact on the linking of a hardware asset to a CI. If there are two assets with the same serial number and/or asset tag, then the management pack will choose the first it encounters in its search (based on the rules described in Hardware asset and computer CI linking).
There is a time delay from when you create or update (basically save an incident) and when the hardware asset relationship is created. Older incidents are not related to the hardware asset after the option is enabled.
If the relationship between the hardware asset and the computer CI was created during an import (using Provance Data Management or CSV import), then the workflow will not include the relationship and you will not see incidents or other work items related to those hardware assets. The workflow targets the relationship between the CI and the work item, not the relationship between the hardware asset and the CI. The latter relationship is the one usually created during an import and would be overlooked by the workflow.
If you remove a CI from the hardware asset, the work items on the asset remain. You must remove the work items manually. Because there could be multiple CIs linked to the asset, the IT Asset Management Pack does not maintain a history of which work items come from which CIs once they are added.