Person Management
A useful feature in Asset Vision it it's ability to automatically discover users in an organization. This is done through many different mechanisms, from Active Director User Object discovery to Logged-on users found by the Optimize agent. However, because of the different methods of discovery, the user records can have slight variations in attributes, and thus, multiple user records from the same user can exist in the database.
To solve this problem, the concept of a Person has been developed in Asset Vision, and allows the linking of one or more user records held within Asset Vision to a single, normalized representation of a person - Person. This Person record can in turn be used for things like machine ownership, license allocation, etc. Therefore, all information that is associated with those multiple accounts will be associated to the Person record, which acts as the main unique identifier for that person.
Two different methods, discussed in detail below, are responsible for creating this record matching: Automatic Matching, and Manual Matching.
Viewing Discovered Users
- User accounts that are discovered in the environment will be located at Admin > User Managment > Discovered Users.
- Admins can locate a specific user by searching based on User ID.
Automatically Link Discovered Users to an existing Person or a New Person
Asset Vision provides the ability to automatically link discovered users to a corresponding Persons. This feature predicts the Person match based on a user's signature, which is composed of the following attributes:
- GUID
- SID
- User Name
- First and Last Name
If Asset Vision finds a person match in it's signature cache table then the user record is automatically linked to it.
If no match was found, then a new person record is created based on the user record, and the user record is linked to it.
In an effort to avoid creating person records that have no substance, as user record must the following fields present:
'user_name' and at least one of the following:
- 'email'
- 'first_name' AND 'last_name'
Initiate the link action
In order to initiate the automatic linking option:
- From the Discovered Users view, select the user or users that are to be assigned to a Person.
- Click the Manage Person button at the bottom-right-hand section of the view, and select Create or Link from Selected.
After the action is complete, a pop-up window will appear with the results of the linking.
Linking Discovered User Accounts to an existing Person or Persons
You can also choose to assign specific discovered user accounts to a known-existing Person record. To do this:
- From the Discovered Users view, select the user or users that are to be assigned to a Person.
- Click the Manage Person button at the bottom-right-hand section of the view, and select Link to Existing.
Selecting a Person
Clicking the Link to Existing button will bring up the Select Persons to Link data view which lists all of the existing Person records. From here you can select the Person for which the discovered user records will be assigned. Once selected, the dialog will accept the change and close.