So I am doing an assets implementation and, for the first time, using assets discovery tool with CSV imports. My question (if I understand the discover tool correctly) is how the results of the discovery tool scans relate to and interact with everything else that I imported manually through CSV. The person who taught me about the discovery tool said basically to keep "duplicates" of IT devices: one that is the result of the scan (super in depth attributes) and one that is for use with connecting to service management stuff.

For example, Laptop 1 would have an entry in my discovery Schema as well as an entry in another IT Assets Schema. The latter would be for general connections to service management, but the former would be if the IT helpdesk would need more in depth details about Laptop 1. My question is whether this is correct. It sounds incorrect to me, but I see why someone would set something up this way i.e. the attributes for service management connections to a helpdesk are usually very different than the kinds of attributes needed for deep IT work on those devices. Second, is there a way to connect the two that is more streamlines or best-practice oriented? The person who taught me suggested to forge references between schemas, but then when I asked if those references would all be wiped on the next discovery import, they said yes, so that seemed odd.

I'm a little lost and not even sure if my questions makes sense. Any help is greatly appreciated!

I have never used the discovery tool myself, so I can't give you hands-on experience there :)

Based on the information on the Atlassian website (not sure if that is accurate or not), there are certain base attributes the discovery tool fetches, and then you can extend that using Pattern settings.

The data should be mapped the same way as when you do a CSV import. So you can have multiple mappings in the import, so you import devices, users, and network objects to different object types or even schemas. In the mapping, you can set object mappings if your attribute is an object linked to another object type in the same object schema or another one.