ServiceNow's future direction for Appliance Classes

[RyanW]

Hi, was wondering if there's any future plan or direction for the Appliance classes by ServiceNow?

Initially our organisation had to create our own 'custom' Appliance class, but now realise that since the Rome release there are 2x Appliance classes created out of the box: "Network Appliance Hardware" (under Configuration Item > Hardware > Computer > Server > Server Hardware) and "Network Appliance Hostname" (under Configuration Item).

Firstly, am not sure what the differences are between the two classes and why the hierarchy between them are so different (one nested under the parent 'Server' class category) and the other is straight under the main 'Configuration Item' class.

Second, I was wondering whether that's where it'll stop (the out of the box creation for Appliance classes) or whether there'll be new appliance classes created, as there are other types of 'Appliances' than just 'Network Appliances'. At least for examples:

1- Server Appliance
2- Storage Appliance
3- Backup Appliance
4- Security Appliance
5- Cryptographic Appliance

Please let us know if there's any plans in the ServiceNow future release pipelines to create anymore new Appliance classes out of the box, and if so, when and under what hierarchy so we can align our organisation with it. Otherwise we might need to come up with our own hierarchy (which would be a pain to fix if ServiceNow's future out of the box new Appliance classes come up under a different hierarchy) and create new Appliance classes ourselves which is not preferred if it could be avoided.

Thanks,

Ryan

[Sylvain Santerr]

Fully agree. There is a need for clear classification for all types of appliances.

[Suman21]

I too agree, Servicenow should start including the Appliances class separately as OOB feature.

Currently we are having tough time to manage the Appliances.

[Christopher Hub]

Looking at the Network Appliance Hostname class, it seems to be something that wouldn't be enriched by Discovery as its default form is pretty spartan.

This almost looks like a placeholder class.  IP address is available as a field, so this might be a table for a lightweight integration with some management layer that has little more than hostname, IP address, and asset information.  In contrast, the Network Appliance Hardware under server looks to me like something we would expect to see for more common appliances.  

For many appliances you can find the OOB supported pattern, and from that derive where they go (for example, EMC devices, Netapp).  As long as you are consistent with them, and thoughtful on class location, it's not a big deal to reclassify if future appliance classes arrive in the CMDB Class Models plugin.

I'd be interested in hearing the future plans for these categories as well, but in general the CMDB classes are flexible for just this use case; There's a lot of device variety out there in the world!

[Gabriel Moreir2]

Please share the Idea if there's one. I'd also love to see this happening and will get some upvotes internally