Open a ticket in most service desks and the device attached to it is a copy. Somewhere, overnight, a job read the monitoring tool’s inventory, matched machines by hostname or serial, and wrote the result into the desk’s own table. By the time a technician reads the ticket, the copy is hours old, and once a month somebody reconciles a spreadsheet to find out how many machines a client really has.
Because the two products have two databases. A sync is the only way to make one product show what the other knows, and it is genuinely hard to get right: hostnames change, serials are missing on virtual machines, a device retired in one system lingers in the other. Every vendor who assembled a platform from acquisitions has one of these jobs, and every one of them drifts.
Billing arguments. The invoice says 212 devices, the client’s own count says 198, and the difference is fourteen machines that were retired in the RMM but never left the desk.
Wrong tickets. A technician connects to the wrong box because the copy pointed at a hostname that was reused.
Reconciliation time. An afternoon a month per client, done by the person who can least afford it.
The 3 am question. When something breaks, which system was right?
Guardian PSA does not mirror devices at all. The device list on a ticket is fetched live from Guardian RMM, because they are the same platform reading the same table. We deliberately retired the sync that used to exist between them. There is nothing duplicated, so there is nothing to drift, and the question of which system is right stops being a question.
Is the device list in your service desk live, or synced overnight? It sounds small. It is the fourth of the ten questions we think actually separate the products in this category, and it is the one that gets the longest silence.
The questions that cannot be answered by a feature checkbox, with our own answers, including where ours is a no.