Best Practices for Defining Asset Name

Rob_Riordan

What are the best practices to use when filling in Asset Name for new hardware?  I often here computer name should be used, but how does that work for hardware that has been received but not yet deployed?

-- Rob

Steve_Wright

Hi Rob,
This is a good question that is probably tricky to answer as it is often determined by company standards and what ever taxonomy (grouping) is in place. That said, there are some ITSM guidelines out there for identifying assets by type, organization or location. 'Received' or  'deployed' are statuses of hardware and probably not reflected in its name.

Hope that helps. I'll let others chime in!

Thanks,

Brett_Moffett

In my experience, naming Assets in a way that is what End Users would commonly call the asset is the best approach.
If you have an Asset Sticker on top of the PC, then use the Asset Tag as the name.
Phones are often tricky as they usually don't have an Asset Tag, so I normally go with the type of phone and it's serial number (iPhone-12345, SamsungS7-455678).
As @Steve_Wright mentioned in the previous comment, most searches that are done by Asset Managers is via other fields such as Status or Vendor so the Asset name itself is not critical for most business processes.
Serial Number or some other way to uniquely identify the Asset is critical. Even if the location of that number is not easy to get to (Serial number on the base of laptops etc)

Hope this helps

Rob_Riordan

Thanks for the replies.  I am leaning towards an asset name that I can create automatically.  I like the suggestion from Brett about using a Manufacturer-Model-Serial number name.  Names that include organization, location, etc tend to become troublesome over time, especially of if the asset moves between groups or locations (that has happened to us before).

Geoff_Ross

Hi Rob,
I agree that putting a name or location in the name can be a pain as this can change, plus there are properties for those on the Asset so its doubling up anyway. 
I understand your issue about wanting to name the assets as per the computer's name but at the time or receiving them and adding them into the system they have no name. This could now becomes a discussion about computer naming but before we get onto that, bear in mind that your naming convention needs to support non PC assets as well if you want to track those, eg mobile devices, networking equipment etc.

Finally, remember, that you can change asset name, anytime you need to, but not asset ID. So you could create the asset with the SN for asset name when it is received and then rename to the computer name, once it is built and named. This can happen automatically, with the right setup. If your process is to rename machines each time they get rebuilt, then the name can change back to SN whilst its back in stock, awaiting a new name once rebuilt.
Hope this is useful.
Geoff

PIERRE-LOUIS_DURRIS

As searching asset is quite complicated in the portal (seraching only in the asset name), the hardware asset name is not changeable in the forms and we built it automatically each time the asset is changed. We do it using a orchestrator runbook.





This is quite heavy as it run twice but it does the work. We do not care any more on the asset name. All the logic for asset name codification is in this power shell script and we could have some logic for particular hardware type.