Location IDs: Linking OTbase Inventory with Discovery

For each location where you want OTbase to automatically place Discovery results, you must provide a unique location ID.

OTbase can automatically put your Discovery results in the right spot, but only if you have set location IDs properly. A location ID is a unique identifier for a given location -- which can be a continent, site, building, cabinet, you name it. As a very rudimentary start, you will want to use location IDs at least for your sites (reference locations).

A location ID doesn't have to make sense to a human user, but it certainly helps if it does. So for example if you want to identify the Body in White building in the Flat Rock plant, you could use a location ID such as "89782". However, something like BIW, or even FRKBIW, would allow for easier troubleshooting in case your devices get lost. If you have an existing nomenclature to designate locations, such as the KNZ system in the electric power industry, you would want to use that.

You can set your location IDs in the edit dialog for a given location/sublocation, or right away when creating a new location.

The important point is to now use these location IDs to place networks and devices discovered by OTbase Discovery automatically in Inventory. In order to do this, you tell Discovery where you want discovery results to go.

In the following example we assign location IDs at three different levels. We set the global default location for our OTbase Discovery node to FRK, which means all devices will be placed in the Flat Rock site if not specified otherwise. For the devices in the Test Network, we set the location ID to BIW, meaning that all devices in that network will be placed in the Body in White building if not specified otherwise. Finally, we set the location ID for one device to BIWCTRL, meaning that this device will end up in the control room of the Body in White building.

Summing up, automatically placing devices where they belong is a simple manner of setting location IDs properly. You will want to have your location hierarchy in OTbase Inventory in place before even thinking about locations in OTbase Discovery. OTbase Inventory will also act as a reference when setting location in Discovery.