Find Out If An Expired Asset Reappears with ServiceDesk Plus and AssetExplorer – Part 1

As part of the asset management lifecycle, you would change the Asset State in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus or AssetExplorer to reflect if an asset has been ‘Disposed’ of or has ‘Expired’:

This has the advantage of releasing an asset node license for commissioning against a new resource in the asset register, keeping your ManageEngine license costs down.

However, what if that asset was to somehow reappear in the environment? A helpful technician who managed to resurrect a device perhaps? The reappearance of a believed to be lost asset?

Whilst the scheduled scans would detect the device again the asset tag will match against an asset in the already ‘Dispose’ or ‘Expired’ asset state. So, by design, that asset data is dropped.

But what if you needed to know this had happened?

There is no direct indication against the asset but, if you navigate to the Community Tab > System Log Viewer, you’ll see a helpful message to indicate that the asset being discovered is in a disabled asset state:

That’s ok but you need to go manually looking for this system log message to check if an expired asset has reappeared on the network.

There are some simple solutions to this. For example, you could use the following SQL query to run a report against the internal system log from the Reports Module > Query Editor:

SELECT LONGTODATE(err.occurredtime) "Date", err.message "Message" from errorlog err WHERE err.message LIKE '%scan is disabled%' AND err.occurredtime >= <from_thisweek> AND err.occurredtime <= <to_thisweek>

If you add some date qualifiers, as shown above, you can set this up as a weekly or monthly scheduled report.

In the next blog post, I’ll discuss how to monitor for this condition in real-time and even potentially raise a ticket directly in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus as a result.

Enjoy!

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