Navigating hardware products

For some use cases you don't want to navigate individual devices but hardware products. This is what the hardware products inventory is for. You can access it by selecting the "Products" tab.

There is no scope selector for hardware products, but the distribution of products across sites, for example, is shown in the hardware product profile of an individual product.

The hardware products page is most useful for lifecycle management, since product lifecycle data for selected vendors is included by default.

Hardware product profiles

In order to open the profile for a specific hardware product, double click on the respective entry in the list. This will pop up a new browser window with all the information for the selected product.

In a hardware product profile you see the following sections that can be expanded and collapsed by clicking on section headers:

Header
The product name, vendor, and version. If set, there may also be a picture, such as a product photo. Usually you will see the vendor's logo instead.

General
General information such as the product category (for example, "L2 Switch") and a link to the vendor's product page. Here you may also find product lifecycle information.

Extended

The content of any custom fields.

Comments
A more verbose description of the hardware product, if set.

Known Vulnerabilities
Any known and published security vulnerabilities of this hardware product.

Known Problems
A list of problem reports that have been issued for this hardware product, if any. For details check the problem management workflow in OTbase.

Installations
A list of all installations of this hardware product, grouped by reference locations.

Firmware
A list of firmware versions installed for this product, along with a graphical representation showing the number of installations per version. For some products you will also see the latest firmware version in the section header.

Files
Any files that have been attached to this hardware product, such as firmware images, documentation, configuration guidelines, user manuals etc.

Product lifecycle information

One of the most important use cases for the hardware product list is obsolescence management. You can sort and filter the product list by product lifecycle status and end of life date. This information is updated automatically by OTbase for many popular products if your administrator has activated the metadata download option on the MAINTENANCE page.

Hardware product treemap

For a visual representation of your installed product numbers grouped by hardware type, you can open an interactive treemap.

For navigation click on any of the tile headers, or on the content tiles. As an example, to learn more about installed Rockwell PLC models, we can click on the Rockwell tile inside "PLC", which results in the following output:

To go back to the previous layer, click on the title bar.