Device Descriptions

OTbase Discovery does a good job of identifying device make and model, serial number, firmware version and so on. However, it cannot know a device's purpose, which is usually most important for users in engineering and maintenance, and also for cyber security experts when trying to determine the criticality of a device.

At the same time, control engineers usually know a particular OT device's purpose fairly well. If they share this knowledge in OTbase, asset information for this device becomes much more useful.

For this reason, every device in OTbase has a description field that is intended to capture just that.

For some devices, the description field is preset by OTbase Discovery to some information that may help you to understand the device's nature and function. This information may, for example, be taken from the SNMP MIB or CIP. The important point is that it's just a default that can and should be substituted with something more concrete, such as Line 3 Glue Mix System. Obviously, such a concrete description will make it very clear to operations, engineering, and maintenance what the purpose of the particular device is.

Adding device descriptions manually

In order to add a device description manually, locate the device in OTbase Inventory, select it and click Edit -- assuming that you have read/write access to the device.

Enter your description in the description field, click Save. A dialog box will pop up and ask you to provide a comment. You can ignore the box by just click OK. (Comments are displayed on the device's timeline for tracking changes and/or updates done to a device's profile.)

Your device now shows the description you have added in the Description column of the inventory.

It will also show in the Device Profile, which you can launch in a new browser window with double-click.

Bulk imports of device descriptions

Chances are that some of your engineers have maintained device descriptions in their Excel tables. If they did, you can import these descriptions via the OTbase Inventory Excel import feature. (INVENTORY ->IMPORT and selecting the Excel tab).

Before you start the import, make sure that your Excel tables are formatted properly, as explained here.