Editing device data

You can manually edit most of the asset data, for example in order to provide specific descriptions of individual devices, point to existing documentation, and so on.

Required access rights

OTbase features a tight access control management which allows administrators to control which assets a particular user can see, and change. OTbase access control uses two different dimensions:

• General inventory access rights
• Extended inventory access rights

Extended inventory access rights may grant members of a particular user group more rights for inventory access, but limited to specific parts of the inventory -- such as devices at a partiular site.

In order to edit asset data, you must be a member of a group with Read/Write access for the device(s) you intend to edit.

The edit device dialog

For editing asset data, select the inventory item that you want to edit and then click the "Edit" button. Afterwards, the following dialog box pops up:

In this dialog, you can now change pretty much every data item for this device, with the exception of few read-only items such as the configuration history (Timeline). You can also attach files to the device which users can then access easily in the device's Profile.

Editing multiple devices at once

You can edit multiple assets at once by selecting the devices that you want to edit and then click on the "Edit" button. This will cause a bulk edit, which allows you to conveniently perform changes for multiple devices in one easy step. If by nothing else, you recognize a bulk edit by the red frame of the edit dialog.

In the example above, we set the stage of two PLCs to "Testing" in one simple operation.

Asset data that you cannot change

There are some fields that you cannot change -- for devices that are monitored by OTbase Discovery. You can identify these fields in the edit dialog because technically, they are protected.

Changing the information in these fields wouldn't make much sense because they would be overwritten the next time that discovery data is imported. -- The same applies to information on hardware modules, connectivity, and software.

If you are faced with a situation where you must change data provided by Asset Discovery, you can turn the automatic updates of configuration data off by removing the "Monitored by OTbase Discovery" tag. This is done by clicking on the "Tags" tab in the edit dialog and then dragging and dropping the tag into the trash bin.