Asset Tracking; DHCP population?

Hi all,

I am pretty new to Solar Winds and asset management in general, but have been tasked with doing device inventory.

I have been able to (manually) populate most of our devices just fine (yay for barcode scanners!), but I have focused mostly on things that do not change (SN, tag #, MAC, etc.). I would also like to track device names, but some of our devices change names fairly regularly.

As we already have the MAC addresses in the system, I was curious if there was an easy (note; I am both a novice, and have limited access to systems) way to automate a matching of the MAC with the device names in DHCP. That way as devices change hands and get renamed, it would automatically rename the network name field in the Asset Mgmt part of Web Help Desk.

We are going through a lot of changes, so the less software/setup I have to bother my higher-ups with would be the best way to go for now until we settle into our new standards and ways of doing things.

Even pointing me in a direction would help at this point. Thanks for your time!

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bvondeylen

What kind of devices are you attempting to inventory?

If you are looking for Windows machines you can open Setup > Assets > Discovery Connections

Choose WHD Discovery Engine (WMI) as your Discovery Tool and WHD will find any Windows machines in the IP Range you specify and add them to Assets in WHD.

If you use JAMF for Macintosh Management, you can have your Assets from JAMF sychronize with WHD automatically. WHD does not currently have a way of synchronizing Mobile Devices from JAMF :-(

If you have a 3rd party service like Absolute Manage (LanRev) or LANSweeper or Microsoft SCCM, you can use those as your Discovery Tool.

Or just import inventory from a spreadsheet and manually maintain…

kellytice

If you do this one as bvondeylen suggested:

Choose WHD Discovery Engine (WMI) as your Discovery Tool and WHD will find any Windows machines in the IP Range you specify and add them to Assets in WHD

then one of the options when you set that up is to set it to recur on a schedule. As long as the MAC address for your machine(s) will stay the same, it should update the existing record(s) accordingly.

caedenv

These are PCoIP Zero Clients

We generally name them after the person assigned to the cubicle, but people play a bit of musical chairs as projects start and stop. Being able to rename the device and have it auto-populate would be handy.