TNI 4.2.0: Improved asset distinction

Hello, friends! Another productive summer for Softinventive Lab is coming to an end. The TNI team has put together a major update that’s sure to make our users happy.
Total Network Inventory 4.2 will now be able to most accurately distinguish between the assets that are added to the storage. The new engine can also be finely tuned if you want either stricter or more lax rules.

We’ll tell you more about these improvements, but first, the list of changes:

Distinguishing between assets

As you know, one of the responsibilities of a network inventory management system is to correctly determine the asset’s type and properties during the first scan. Then upon a repeat scan, the system must correctly identify the asset, distinguish it from records of other network assets present in the storage, find the matching record and merge it with the snapshot from the new scan. The mechanism in charge of this process must be smart enough to both avoid creating a duplicate record and not merge the new snapshot with a similar, but different asset.

A new IP, network name or active user, replaced hardware, and even a cloned operating system – these and other possible changes must be taken into account when the new scan results are processed.

Our new approach

The update introduces multi-level logic that allows TNI to compare various properties of network assets in order to precisely identify if the newly scanned asset is already present in the storage. If you want to fine-tune this logic, go to the storage properties in the program:

The default settings for this logic are well-balanced and should be suitable for most types of networks. After all, don’t we all love it when everything works right out of the box?

Don’t worry about installing the new update. The program won’t start processing and merging the assets that are already in storage.

But if you’ve found that the old mechanism has been struggling to correctly merge snapshots from the same printer or ESXi server, you will now have the power to do it manually from the network tree’s context menu.

Consequently, more information will be collected during the scan, so don’t forget to update your standalone scan agents if you use these scanning methods.

We hope you find the new feature to your liking. And if you don’t really notice the changes, then everything works exactly as we planned.

Drop us a message if you have questions about setting up the distinction logic. We’re always happy to help.

Save time and enjoy working with TNI. We’ll be back soon!