I have been growing increasingly frustrated with the Asset Management capabilities of FreshService. The biggest frustration so far is that even as an account administrator I am not allowed to make certain changes to products, assets and asset types.
We are using the FreshService Agent to discover our client computer systems and so far that is working well for the most part. However, there are inconsistencies in how assets are being automatically assigned an asset type... for example, Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 are assigned the asset type of "Laptop" but the Surface Pro 2 is assigned the asset type of "Computer."
Not a huge problem, I'll just go in and update the Surface Pro 2 product so that it is considered a laptop. Except I am prevented from doing so because it's locked from editing. Forget the fact that I would actually like to edit all of the Surface Products so that they are listed as "Tablets" rather than laptops or computers.
What's worse is that for our Agents, this means there is little logical order in finding assets. If they were entering assets manually and wanted to add a Surface Pro 2, they would not fine it listed with the Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 under the Laptop category. They would instead need to look within "Computer" to find it. This is a mess and in no way intuitive.
Please give Administrators (and Asset Management Agents) the ability to make these common sense changes so that assets and products can be logically organized and accessed.
As it stands, it seems the only way around this would require lots of additional/unnecessary work... I believe I would have to go into my custom Tablet asset type and create a new products for each type of Surface and then manually reassign the discovered assets to them. Once all assets were reassigned I could delete out the wrongly categorized products. But then I have no idea if future Surface assets that get discovered through the Agent would see the new custom "Surface Pro 2" product under Tablet and respect that or if it would again generate a new product type within the more generalized "Computer" asset type like it originally had.
Similar issues are found when dealing with the asset type hierarchy itself (and I have commented about this on another customer's ticket.) The inability to delete or hide stock asset types even though we'll never use them it's frustrating. Asset types not being contained inside of logical containers and no ability to move or delete them is frustrating. For example, it makes more sense to have Router, Switch, Access Point and Firewall asset types contained within Network rather than left randomly placed within the greater "Hardware" category. As it stands, even if I created a new "Network Hardware" asset category, I would be unable to move the existing asset types to it because they are default asset types and you cannot move them. (or delete or hide them)
I have been trying to figure out if there are good reasons that we are restricted like this, but I have been unable to figure it out. Please either explain the logic for preventing these types of changes or work to remove these limitations allowing Administrators to adapt the system to their unique use cases.
Thanks!
- Nathan
