Serial numbers and inventory tracking with CW2K

[moorera]

I've noticed that often the serial number CW2K gathers from our 2500, 2600, 4500 and 7206 routers differ from what shows up in our smartnet agreement. I *think* I remember reading somewhere that there are two different ways of recording serial numbers or something like that and hence one of the uses for the user defined field.

My question is, how best is it to track the serial numbers of deployed devices so I can keep a tighting control on our inventory managment? Is there a white paper or something out there that is specific to Cisco and CiscoWorks?

[rmushtaq]

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/477/SNMP/chassis.shtml will help you understand how CW2K/RME or any other SNMP app collects this information via SNMP. The make a long story short, what you're seeing is the expected result in RME for routers. You must either enter the serial# manually for routers in the config first cia the snmp-server chassis-id command before RME can show them in the inventory reports OR use the Change Device Attributes feature in RME to update these Serial# manually for the routers. Again, the above tech tip wil help you understand this better.

[moorera]

Thanks. I shall give it a read.

[sarbjeet-dhillon]

In my experience in inventory management, serial numbers retrieved by RME tend to be different to the Cisco boxes themselves. In a nutshell, the serial number on your smartnet agreement is likely to be the serial number label found on the back of the Cisco chassis if you inspect it. The serial number retrieved by RME is either a serial number configured using snmp or the electronic value retrieved from a MIB supported on that device. In my experience with newer devices with newer versions of code the MIB is beginning to be populated with the same serial numbers as that on the back of the box.

The key to inventory management is proper controls, processes and procedures. There are a couple of white paper links to asset/inventory management on my companies website (www.3net-uk.com) under the Netlocate Service (Inventory Management Service)