How to best represent a Meeting Room in CMDB?

[Florian Spisla]

We are discussing the best way to somehow incorporate our meeting rooms in the CMDB. They contain various technical equipment (Teams PC, screen, digtal whiteboards aka touchscreen, and other special equipment) and our Servicedesk would like to open an INC ticket with the room as CI. Also if we have a change to one of the components, normally the whole room would be out-of-order.

Has one of you done this before? What would your suggested solutions be?

[Niklas Peterson]

Hi,

I've never done that and I don't think I ever will do that. Seems a bit weird to me. To me, Rooms are locations - not CIs.

But anyway, if I would do it then I would go for the cmdb_ci_computer_room CI Class. That's the only room CI Class I've encountered. Adding a type attribute with a value of "Meeting Room" to separate it from Computer Rooms in Data Centers.

Regards,
Niklas

[mikkojuola]

Hello,

I don't remember exactly in which release this was introduced, but nowadays the Location (cmn_location) table has a Location Type attribute that includes "Room" as an option.

This would allow you to manage your "technical equipment" as CIs and connect them to Rooms as Locations. Every CI has the Location attribute by default.

This would not allow you to record incidents against the room directly as a CI, but should work for other use cases and seems to be the recommended approach by ServiceNow.

[Florian Spisla]

Thanks to you two for the answers! I see your points and to be honest the main problem is a bit with the acceptance and how we use ServiceNow and a definition of responsibilities.

If a user reports an issue with a meeting room, our Servicedesk creates a ticket and needs to be able to put in a CI (mandatory for our INC form). I was thinking of creating a (technical) service offering for each meeting room.

[Ed Laar]

Hi,

In my point of view a meeting room is a location_type as already mentioned. Be aware that the Location name is often used in operational processes so it should have a naming convention that is easy to use in these processes.
In a meeting room there is many equipment installed: I should represent them as CI's. There is also the EAM module available since Tokyo making the registration of non-IT equipment possible.

One step further: The CI's in a meeting room provide certain Business Service offerings towards the users of that meeting room like 'beaming service' or 'conferencing service'. Perhaps it's a good idea to represent such services in the CSDM model framework. A bit to detailed perhaps but in fact every meeting room can have it's own Application Services represented in this way and that enables you to also related Technical Service Offerings granting the possibility to assign as directly as possible tickets to the correct Service Vendor.

Grtz,

Ed