For those curious - I opened a ticket with Freshservice support and received the below answer.
TL;DR version is if an asset’s name is manually updated, future auto-updates won’t override the manual name because it’s assumed the ‘manual’ input is ‘final’
I have replied expressing my concern and pointing out the poor design of this and manual work, as this makes the Inventory section of Freshservice no longer a reliable source of truth.
Reply from Freshservice:
Here’s some clarification on how the Discovery tools work and why the asset name might not be updating:
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Discovery Agent vs. Discovery Probe Priority:
- When a device uses both the Discovery Agent and Discovery Probe, the Discovery Agent takes precedence. This means that the Probe will not override any asset information updated by the Agent. This is expected behaviour.
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Manual Updates Prevent Future Automatic Updates:
- If either the Discovery Agent or Probe initially updates the asset’s display name or hostname, and a user manually changes the name in Freshservice, the system interprets the manual update as the final input. Once manually updated, the display name will not be updated by the Agent or Probe going forward.
While the above scenarios might not entirely apply to this asset, it’s worth reviewing if the name of the asset in questionwas manually updated in Freshservice. If so, that could explain why subsequent updates from the Discovery Agent or Probe were not reflected.
i thought was just me as i have been recently working on asset naming convention automation using workflows, i guess they way to force this back to how it use to work is create a workflow that is a scheduled event with condition if hostname is not empty then make a expression
equalsIgnoreCase('{{asset.name}}', '{{asset.hostname}}')
then action to set
Set item name as {{asset.hostname}}
I havent tested this yet
i can confirm the workflow is working using the trigger “last updated by source” discovery agent.
simply just put your conditions in and and use an api call to put “hostname” as Asset name