ITSM - Hardware Asset Management and CSDM

[Ed Laar1]

Hi CSDM enthousiasts,

Has anyone implemented HW Asset Management in conjunction with CSDM and how has this been done?

Practical: HW Asset Management takes care during the end2end life cycle of hardware assets about the status, location, version, financials and so on. HW Asset Management also takes care about support contract for hardware assets like Vendor warranty contracts, Vendor HW support contracts and so on.

What is the best way to register those contracts taking CSDM into consideration? First what comes up in my mind: Nothing changes: Register these things as featured by the HW Asset Management module.

My confusions come in my mind when I look into CSDM and see the famous Technical Services..... They are not the services like Vendor Warranties aren't they??

Looking forward to any reactions and comments,

Ed

[Ed Laar1]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your answer. It's helps to glue all the aspects together I think. Your absolutely right on the fact that ITIL describes Warrenty as a contract; no doubt about that and in fact: It is a contract or more practical: it is an (written) agreement that the product under warrenty is 100% functional for a certain period.

From operational perspective we (should) want to make our service processes as streamlined and as automated as possible. This means that from this perspective all the information about the consumed service, the components that supply this service and all the arrangements around this (like consumed service SLA and solver group and the (possible) involved component(s), related services, SLA's and solver groups) should be available to take the correct actions like solver-group(s) assignment and so on.

This is why I think (!) that we should find a uniform way reaching at the end the described demand: Have in only one view all the aspects around a service or around a component available so decisions leading to the fastest and most efficient way to solve an issue are available and thus automatable as much as possible.

Also in this way the (possible) impact of a change can be evaluated and pre-cautions can be arranged to prevent service degredations.

Looking forward to your reaction and thankfull for this discussion: I think it helps everyone.

Ed

[Alex_Dundon1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the feedback! I personally learn best by using examples and patterns, so applying examples such as yours to flesh out the robust nature of this CSDM is very important to me at least.

I completely agree that having a unified dashboard of sorts that pulls in all relevant information about a particular CI, it's related impacted services, contracts, etc. would be extremely helpful to quickly resolve incident tickets and understand potential service impacts. I think ServiceNow has recently developed a CMDB Workbench, similar to the Change Workbench that may or may not be able to help do that.

Great conversation 🙂