Asset Ownership vs Usage vs Support

[Ryan S]

Looking for some guidance on how this information should be tracked on an asset (and if folks want to speak to the CI side of it too I won't object 😀).

Server was purchased by Company A from Vendor Z. It's managed by Company A's support group "Group X." The Server is being used by Company B (maybe the actual server or it could be Company B is accessing an application that is running on the server; would like to understand both scenarios). Where does ServiceNow intend each of these data elements to be populated?

Possible locations seem to include:

1. Asset.Company

2. Asset.Owned_by (except this is a person, not a group, so would it be a custom field for owner_group or stored on a related record?)

3. Asset.Vendor

4. CI has a 'Subscribed by' related list

5. Asset.Support_group

[Shivalika]

Hello @Ryan S 

1)You can populate company A, you can directly populate it on "Asset.company" as you said. 

2)For Venzor Z - also you can directly populate on the "Asset.Vendor" as you said. 

3)For the Support Group X also you can populate it in "Support group field of Asset"

4)For used by Company B - I am assuming this references core_company table - you might take a person from managerial post from this company and put him in "Managed BY " of Asset. There is already "Company" field on the user's profile so that can be traced from there, correctly. 

Kindly mark my answer as helpful and accept solution if it helped you in anyway. This will help me be recognized for the efforts and also move this questions from unsolved to solved bucket. 

Regards,

Shivalika 

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[Kieran Anson]

These types of questions are fun because there are multiple ways depending on the view you take.

From a purely ITAM view point

• Vendor would be the supplier/retailer in which the asset was purchased or leased from
• Company would be the owner of the asset from a financial perspective. The asset is part of their liability and tangible depreciable assets.
• Beneficiary would be the organisation with a significant interest. In your example "Company B" if they have autonomy over the asset.

You need to consider whether the company:

• Has autonomy over what the asset does, how it's used, and it's configuration
  • If yes, they're likely the beneficiary. You can subscribe the company to the CI for completeness to feed into ITIL processes
• Consumes the assets purpose, but does not dictate whether that particular asset provides a service/capability
  • Then they likely only have an interest in the CMDB side of the asset. Again, the subscribed by list would be used
• Consumes a service that the asset provides, but has no involvement in the asset, the asset is abstracted away
  • Then you're likely looking at an application service which they're consuming, which has a dependency on the CI. In this instance, the "subscribed by" list would on the application service

[Ryan S]

Excellent insights as always Kieran. When you speak of "Beneficiary" is that a field on the Asset or somewhere in the system?

The rest of it does sound like CSDM would be the way to go. Considering a pre-crawl phase here, I'm thinking we'll need to decide how to capture that "consumes" piece of it at the beginning without needing to build out the entire CSDM model but hopefully not have to redo it all later.

[Kieran Anson]

Hey,

It should be available as part of the baseline asset management product. It's a field on alm_asset. Although I am now wondering if my PDI has it due to other plugins.....