How to associate multiple Assets to a single Configuration Item

[ManyToMany]

Hi all,

Can anyone advise on how one would go about relating multiple assets to a single configuration item? To me this should be quite simple as assets and configuration items should be treated as a many to many relationship but it seems ServiceNow treat them as 1:1 relationship type of situation. 

In my use case as a Network Engineer many devices can be configured into one logical device for example, the C9300 series cisco switches can made up of 1-8 devices (Assets) but are considered to be 1 logical device (CI). How can I create CI in ServiceNow then relate 1-8 assets to this particular CI? Is this even possible considering how Asset-CI mapping and synchronization works?

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @ManyToMany 

A CI can mapped to 1 Asset at a time. Did not find any related list  to map CI with Asset .

[CMDB Whisperer]

Asset and CI are two sides of a single coin and thus have a one-to-one relationship when they are linked.  In your example the logical CI is tracked at the main switch level, and also has an asset which represents the chassis or perhaps the management interface.  Individual modules are also assets that are children of the chassis asset.  Each of these may also have a CI, which is related to the main switch CI using CI relationships or references.  Alternately, this could be represented without the parent asset, and only the individual devices are tracked as assets.  A scenario for this might be that the actual switches are not in an enclosure and may be distributed across different physical locations (racks, rooms, etc.)  In this case, there is no parent asset.  The logical top level CI is related to its 1-8 individual child CIs, and each of those is related to a single asset.  The specifics of how this works may depend on your specific tools and processes that are used to populate your asset and CI records.

[ManyToMany]

Hi CMDB Whisper, 

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@CMDB Whisperer wrote:

Asset and CI are two sides of a single coin and thus have a one-to-one relationship when they are linked.  In your example the logical CI is tracked at the main switch level, and also has an asset which represents the chassis or perhaps the management interface.  Individual modules are also assets that are children of the chassis asset.  Each of these may also have a CI, which is related to the main switch CI using CI relationships or references.  Alternately, this could be represented without the parent asset, and only the individual devices are tracked as assets.  A scenario for this might be that the actual switches are not in an enclosure and may be distributed across different physical locations (racks, rooms, etc.)  In this case, there is no parent asset.  The logical top level CI is related to its 1-8 individual child CIs, and each of those is related to a single asset.  The specifics of how this works may depend on your specific tools and processes that are used to populate your asset and CI records.

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This is actually quite close to my situation, but I'll explain it in a better detail. Multiple Cisco switches in this example the Catalyst 9300 series can be configured to be a "Switch Stack", this is the concept of multiple individual switches connected together by their data ports which allows them to be configured as ONE logical device. This means they're no longer individual configuration items but series of assets/hardware that make up one logical configuration item being the "Switch Stack". To put it further they also share the same configuration as well and if one of the "Switch Stack" members failed and had to be replaced you could just remove the old one and connect the new one and it'd inherit existing configuration from the stack for the member it replaced.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense but at the end of the day the CI is just a logical construct that comes into creation after an asset has been configured, it seems odd that a CI then couldn't be made up of one or more assets if they're configured in a way that transforms them into one logical device. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

The point is that they basically can!  Each of those assets also has its own CI, which is related to the logical parent CI.  The individual CIs describe how the individual asset is configured, and also provides the relationships to the parent CI.