Should I be able to add a printer to the Printer inventory area manually? I don't have a + symbol like the rest of the area's.
Hi y'all, I can add some clarity here.
The way we discover printers via the Discovery Agent is by pulling in any printer driver that has been added to the computer. This isn't the best way to collect printers and leads to printers that might not be managed by your team to be added to the system. On top of that, it's hard to identify duplicates this way.
Discovering printers via the Discovery Scanner is the best way to bring printers into SWSD. When you use the scanner, we can see a printer and realize if its a duplicate from another scanner but we find that you wouldn't have two scanners on the same network anyways.
The reason we don't have a + button in the printers area is due to the way this page/index was originally designed. The original request from customers was to bring the printer information out from the hardware tab on a computer asset so they can easily see the printers in their environment. This area was designed to be more of a read only area with little actions on the printers themselves as its just an index of the printer area on the computer.
That being said, we recognize that this needs to change and we have plans to change this. Our plan is to move all asset types, including printers, into our CI data model which will allow you to add/remove/edit all assets in SWSD. This will also allow you to also tie all related asset types together to have a better understanding of your environment. This work has already begun and we are first working on moving over the network devices area. After that we will move to computer, other assets, software, and printers.
In regards to the Android agent for mobile devices, we have made a decision to not invest in developing our own agent to collect data from Android devices moving forward. Our plan is to continue to invest in integrating with MDM solutions so you can bring those assets into SWSD to then relate to other assets, services, and users.
This type of feedback is great and allows me to continue to work towards making our asset management area more mature and the best in the market. Please continue to provide feedback here in THWACK!
Thanks,
Joey Brown
Senior Product Manager - ITSM
Those are discovered printers, so you can't add to those. We tend to ignore that section of Assets because of problems with duplicates and only use it in the rare cases that we need to see which devices have any variation of a specific printer installed.
We wanted to do lifecycle tracking of printers and MFDs, so we added them as Other Assets and created new custom fields to make sure we could track all the information we needed.
Maybe someone from Solarwinds will chime in with an example of how they see customers using Assets>Printers successfully?
It looks like it works the same as their phone inventory, and about as well as their discontinued Android feature. I had also asked on chat, and this is what they had said. I am seeing the same thing you are with the same thing listed many times.
The Discovery Agent and Discovery Scanner can only detect printers in the inventory. For documentation, please visit this link: https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/swsd/content/discoveryinstalationguide/discovery-installation-guide.htm
Thanks, it looks like we have that installed at one point, though it also lists things from 3 to 20 times.
Things being printers
You also have to configure a scanning network method that can reach your printers, and those printers have to support the scanning method you choose. So there it depends a lot upon their network infrastructure and specific devices, but they might as well configure all of the relevant connections for the areas they want to scan. The more connections, the more data they will get. You may also check this documentation: https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/swsd/content/discoveryguide/review%20of%20your%20discovery%20instance.htm
Thank you, I will look into this. It would be nice if I could manually add them, but I will see what I can do with the discovery feature.
Unfortunately, you can only add printer assets manually in the Other Assets section. However, this is a great idea to add this option to our service desk application. I would suggest submitting this idea to our Thwack Community under the "Feature Requests" tab: https://thwack.solarwinds.com/product-forums/solarwinds-service-desk-swsd/i/feature-requests.
Thank you for that. It will be nice if we are able to have more top level hardware categories, and not the catch basin of other assets that currently has desk phones, monitors, remote employee VPN boxes, and such.
