Insight Asset Management: how to import new hardware?

[Christian Schneider]

Dear community,

we are a small IT department of a clinic and we are using Insight for our asset management. We import a lot of data from our SCCM or Nedi, but new hardware assets are created manually.

We talked to our hardware provider: we could get a *.csv with the details of delivered hardware (laptops, displays, printers, ... incl. serial numbers, ...).

We could put that file into a folder and get Insight to grab it from there. I would make the import run every few minutes. the agent then can add some data to the item and it can be linked to other objecttypes.

Problem: If the import of the same file runs again, the manually added data is lost.

Question: is there a best practice on how to do the first steps of the life cycle management of hardware in Insight?

Ideas:

• We tried to find a way to do an import "create only, no updates", but this does not seem to be possible.
• I thought about connecting Insight with a Jira Workflow. Import the data into an objecttype "imported hardware". This should create a Jira issue, which then could be used to enrich the data of the hardware object and move it into the right objecttype. would this be possible?

Any suggestions are highly welcome. (note: we are about to move to cloud, so a solution should work in cloud as well. ;-))

[Carla Ann Rowland]

1. Make sure you scheme has same headers of the csv data you want imported
2. Make sure in the scheme and the csv that the unique identifier is set correctly.
3. when you run the import configuration adds new items or updates the existing data

to quote another user:

"Use the Identifier setting: 

Some of your attributes will need to be unique and this can be configured in the import configurations. In the object type mapping setup you can set an attribute as Identifier. When the import is run, the rows will be checked against this attribute to see if the object already exists or not. If it exists it, the object will be updated, otherwise it will be created. "