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Inventory maintenance best practices

I'm looking for any best practices around maintaining inventory in FNMS.  Specifically the Ignored Inventory and Inventory without Assets sections.  In the past we have been ignoring any inventory (computers) not reporting in >90 days.  In order to do that in the Ignored Inventory section, you have to remove their links to assets first before you can ignore.  This puts those assets in the Inventory without Assets page.  When you assign them to assets, they get marked ignored and go back into the Ignored Inventory page.  Has anyone else seen this and how do you best handle?

(4) Replies
mfranz
By Level 17 Champion
Level 17 Champion

Hi Kathy,

If you set the asset itself to a status like "Retired", the corresponding inventory will automaticlaly be set to "Inactive". Here is a snippet from the FNMS online help:

2019-07-09_17h15_53.png

For general inventory maintenance, my experience is that each specific implementation (manually or automatically) is only as good as the actual maintenance process (and the data it can provide).

Best regards,

Markward

Yes I was aware that a retired asset would mark the inventory device as ignored. However we are seeing 'active' assets (Installed/In storage) that are marking inventory devices to ignored when the asset is linked to the inventory.

When an asset record is linked to an inventory device record, the inventory device status gets set to "Ignored" if the asset's status is "Retired" or "Disposed"; otherwise the inventory device status gets set to "Active".

(For the technically inquisitive, this status setting is done in the ComplianceComputerAlertCreationOnInsertUpdate trigger on the ComplianceComputer_MT table in the compliance database.)

If you are seeing different behavior then that sounds wrong to me. I'm not sure would might happen to cause that.

(Did my reply solve the question? Click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION" to help others find answers faster. Liked something? Click "KUDO". Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera.)

Hi Kathy,

The confusion might result from the way FNMS treats Inventories linked to an Asset having its status set to "In storage".

In older releases of FNMS, an Inventory that was linked to an Asset having the status "In storage" was considered to be active and all applications on the Inventory were counted.

In newer releases of FNMS, if the Asset has a status of "In storage", the Inventory is still being managed by FNMS and is considered an active inventory and will count against your FNMS license.

However, if the Asset is "In storage", all applications will be removed from the Inventory linked to the Asset now. This Inventory is active, but will not consume any software licenses. This behavior is shown in the response from @mfranz, too. 

You can build a custom report from the FNMS Web UI that shows both the status of the Inventory as well as the status of the Asset linked to it in distinct columns.