Asset Management as a Discovery Source & working with Reconciliation Rules

[Alec Hanson]

Hi,

When creating an Asset I see that the Discovery Source is set to "SNAssetManagement", however any further updates don't seem to set the DiscoverySource. Anyone know if that is expected?

Further I was trying to simulate the definition of Reconciliation Rules to stop Asset Management updates from driving updates to CIs, where the CI has been Discovered by a trusted source i.e. SCCM but can't get that working and not sure if this is related to the lack of Discovery Source being set on the updates?

Thanks

[CJ22]

Hello.  Did you ever resource this?

[Alec Hanson]

Hi @CJ22,

I have just come back round to this and unfortunately have not managed to find any answer.

In effect it seems that:

- On Asset Create:

  -> If glide.asset.create_ci_with_ire is true then the CI is created from an Asset as if it was any other Data source, going through identification AND reconcilliation

  -> If glide.asset.create_ci_with_ire  is false, then the CI is create in the traditional way without using the IRE API

- On Update, IRE is ignored altogether and where appropriate a direct update to the CI is made.

It does seem that a glide.asset.update_ci_with_ire property and related functionality would be really helpful.

I assume you have not found any different?

Alec

[CJ22]

No.  We had a slightly different issue that was from instance upgrades.

[Ben Schlick]

How has this question gone unanswered for so long...? Anyway. Default and expected behavior is to import assets as Assets ONLY. There is a separate part of the servicenow database, under the foundation tables called alm_asset which is the parent to all other Asset tables. Asset records go there and only there, the updating source should be an application(s) used in Source 2 Pay operations. Once an Asset record rests in the proper table; Discovery automatically checks newly discovered devices Serial Number against the Asset tables. If there is a match, the records marry AND the CI status values MOSTLY supersede asset status updates. Why? Discovery requires a "physical" connection for the device to report so there is little question why Discovery takes priority when managing status values for each device+asset.

For your use case, it seems like the creation of assets automatically creates a CI. This isn't recommended but is often a shortcut with long term administrative burden. Since the Asset creation automates a CI, the Discovery Source for the CI is automatically set to SNAssetManagement. This tells CMDB/ITOM/Discovery engineers *where* the data came from. When I see a CI with the Discovery Source of SNAssetManagement, I have a high confidence that the CI was created from an Asset without Discovery. This is also true if an organization isn't utilizing the Asset tables too. If an excel sheet is imported to various cmdb_ci tables, I expect to see the Discovery Source equal to SNAssetManagement.