Resource detection links a specific monitor to a specific desk, so users are checked in at the exact desk they plug into and get a booking created for them if they don't have one. It is also what makes the floor and desk occupancy dashboards accurate. This article covers the Resource detection page, mapping monitors manually and automatically, what mapping mode changes while you work, and how to export the finished mapping into an asset management system.
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- The Resource detection page
- Map a monitor to a desk
- How auto-mapping confirms a match
- Mapping mode
- Conflicts and moved monitors
- After a monitor is mapped
- Exporting the monitor-to-desk mapping
1. The Resource detection page
Office presence and hardware mapping live on two separate pages, each with a single purpose:
- Office detection (Admin > deskbird Intelligence > Office detection): network-based office presence — which networks count as which office. See Setting up office detection and network configuration.
- Resource detection (Admin > deskbird Intelligence > Resource detection): mapping monitors to desks, covered in this article.
Use the office selector in the top right to switch offices. The page is split into two tabs, one per resource type:
- Desks: everything needed to map monitors to desks. The Mapped desks card shows the share of desks with a mapped monitor, plus the active mapping status (for example Auto-mapping disabled). Below it, pick a floor to see its floor plan, click Show next to Connected monitors to display them on the plan, use the Hide Labels toggle to declutter the view, and click Start mapping mode to map monitors manually.
- Rooms: monitor mapping is not available for meeting rooms. This tab contains a short in-app survey about interest in hardware sensors for room occupancy — answers go straight to the deskbird product team.
💡 Note: the Desks tab needs a published floor plan for the selected floor. If it shows No floor plan available, publish the floor plan in Floors & spaces first.
2. Map a monitor to a desk
The floor, area and desk must all be active in a published floor plan, and the desk must be bookable by the user. First choose how monitors should be mapped for the office:
- Navigate to Admin > deskbird Intelligence > Resource detection
- Select the desired office in the top right and open the Desks tab
- Click the Mapped desks card to open Mapping progress detail
- Under Mapping method, select one of the following and click Save:
- Automatic + Manual (recommended): automatically matches monitors to booked desks while keeping manual mapping available. Set Minimum detections to confirm match — the number of separate days a monitor must be seen at the same desk before the match is confirmed (default 3, maximum 50).
- Manual Only: no automatic matching. Every monitor has to be connected and confirmed on the floor plan by hand.
Track progress under Desks / Monitors in the Mapped and Unmapped tabs, which can be searched and filtered.
To map a monitor manually (available with either method):
- On the Desks tab, select the floor the desk is on
- Click Start mapping mode and confirm
- Connect the monitor to your device to surface it in the system
- Select the correct desk on the floor plan, then click Map to link the monitor to it
💡 Note: monitors that do not report a usable serial number, product code and manufacturer ID can never be mapped and never appear in the list, however often they are connected — any one of the three being missing is enough. In the Dock window they appear under Overview > Detected monitors as "Unknown display", tagged Unmapped. This is the first thing to check when a monitor does not surface.
Both mapping methods depend on office detection being set up first. A monitor is only ever registered once the device it is plugged into has matched a recognized office network — so with no network configured for an office, its monitor list stays empty and neither manual nor automatic mapping can start. Add your networks under Admin > deskbird Intelligence > Office detection, or see Setting up office detection and network configuration.
3. How auto-mapping confirms a match
With Automatic + Manual selected, a day counts towards a match only when someone connects the monitor while they have an active desk booking — and the desk it counts towards is the one they booked, not anything the monitor itself reports. Repeated connections on the same day count once, so a Minimum detections to confirm match value of 3 means three separate days. Only the last 30 days are considered, so a monitor has to reach the threshold within that window.
The counts in Mapping progress detail update as detections come in, but confirmation runs once a day at 02:00 office time — so a match you can watch building today is applied the following morning. Saving Automatic + Manual as the mapping method runs that office once within the hour, rather than waiting for the next 02:00.
⚠️ Important: in offices where people do not book a desk before they arrive, auto-mapping never confirms a match. Map those desks manually — a permanently empty Mapped tab is almost always this.
4. Mapping mode
Clicking Start mapping mode on the Desks tab starts mapping mode, and a confirmation dialog appears first: "Start mapping mode? While mapping mode is active, automatic check-ins and bookings are paused. It turns off automatically when you leave the page."
While mapping mode is active, a banner reads "Mapping mode is active. Automatic desk check-ins and bookings are paused while you're on this page." with a Disable mapping mode button. Once it is turned off or the page is left, the banner switches to "Mapping mode is off. Automatic desk check-ins and bookings have resumed."
⚠️ Important: mapping mode pauses automatic desk check-ins and bookings for the admin's own device only — colleagues are unaffected. It also stops that device's detections from being recorded at all, so nothing captured during mapping mode appears in analytics or counts towards an auto-mapping match. Admins testing resource detection on their own device should leave mapping mode before expecting an automatic check-in, and allow a short moment for detection to resume. If the browser tab is closed without leaving the page, mapping mode switches itself off after about two minutes.
5. Conflicts and moved monitors
Conflicts only ever apply to monitors that are not mapped yet. They come out of the same day-counting that feeds auto-mapping: if the same unmapped monitor is seen at two or more different desks, it is flagged for you to resolve instead of being confirmed to either one.
⚠️ Important: once a monitor is mapped, moving it to another desk does not raise a conflict. It stays mapped to its original desk until you re-map it, which replaces the old mapping — mapping it again from scratch is refused while the first mapping exists.
If a device resolves two mapped monitors that point at different desks, monitor detection is dropped without a prompt: the user is checked into the office, but no desk action happens. The same applies if the two monitors are mapped in different offices — the desk signal is abandoned and the user is checked into whichever office their network matched. A single monitor mapped in one office but detected on another office's network is dropped the same way: the network decides the office, and the desk is ignored. None of these cases produce an admin-visible warning, so a monitor that has physically moved between offices needs re-mapping by hand.
6. After a monitor is mapped
Once a monitor is mapped, a user who connects to it is detected at that desk and checked in — provided that:
- their device is also detected on that office's network
- the office uses the User authenticated privacy mode (see Privacy modes and data handling)
- the desk is bookable by them, with no closure policy or booking restriction blocking it
- desk check-in is enabled for that office — if it is not, the booking is still created, but it is not checked in
A booking created this way runs from the moment of detection until the end of the person's own default booking hours for that weekday, or until the office closes if those hours are switched off or already past.
If they already booked a different desk
If the person already has a desk booking elsewhere in the same office that day, it is released and replaced by a booking at the detected desk — including when they had already checked in there. Bookings in other offices, and parking bookings, are never touched. If the release does not go through, no new booking is created, so they can be left without a desk booking for that day; booking again by hand is the fix.
Monitor detection applies to desks only, not to meeting rooms or parking.
⚠️ Important: when a desk booking is created by monitor detection, a parking booking the person already has for that day is not checked in along with it, and remains subject to the usual auto-cancellation window. They need to check the parking booking in themselves.
Mapping is not stored on the device, so a new mapping is live immediately and there is no cache to wait out. It takes effect from the next detection, not retroactively. To trigger a detection straight away, disconnect and reconnect the monitor — that reaches deskbird within about 15 seconds. Sync now, on the Dock window's Activity page, re-sends what Dock has already detected, which is enough to pick up a new mapping but does not re-scan the connected displays. The "up to an hour" delay applies to office network rules only.
💡 Tip: monitor mapping coverage also determines how accurate the floor and desk occupancy dashboards are. Desks without a mapped monitor always count as unused. See Occupancy analytics (deskbird Dock analytics).
7. Exporting the monitor-to-desk mapping
Mapping data doesn't have to stay inside deskbird. Once monitors are mapped, the full list can leave the Admin area and flow into an IT asset management (ITAM) or CMDB system — so hardware records show which monitor sits at which desk, without walking the floor to check it manually.
CSV export: to download the mapping for one office:
- Navigate to Admin > deskbird Intelligence > Resource detection
- Select the desired office in the top right and click the Mapped desks card on the Desks tab to open Mapping progress detail
- Under Desks / Monitors, on the Mapped tab, click Export CSV
Each export contains the following columns, in this order:
- Manufacturer
- Manufacturer ID
- Display Name
- Serial Number
- Product Code
- Manufacture Week
- Manufacture Year
- State
- Last Connection
- Office Name
- Floor Name
- Area Name
- Desk Name
- Mapped At
Timestamps are rendered in the office's timezone, with the zone shown — for example 2026-04-02 10:15 (Europe/Berlin).
The export runs per office, so repeat the steps above for each office you need. Only mapped monitors are included — desks without a mapped monitor do not appear in the file.
API access: the same mapped-monitor data is available through the deskbird API. Use it to pull the mapping into an ITAM or CMDB system on a schedule, instead of downloading and importing CSV files by hand. It covers every office in one call and, unlike the CSV, also returns monitors that are not mapped yet. Both the public API and deskbird Intelligence have to be enabled for your company — talk to your deskbird contact if the endpoint returns a permission error.