Locations Hierarchy in CMDB

[Ulrich Schulte]

I want to track locations of my hardware assets (for example for a network printer) in the CMDB showing the following information: City (or site) -> Building -> Floor -> Room.

First of all: Is there any best practise available on how to do this? (did not find something useful at ServiceNow reference docs yet)

We do have the location field for CIs, but in general this is being used for cities or sites, but not for rooms. 

My idea: Create child locations. So I got for example "Hamburg" as a parent location / site, below Hamburg I create "buiding A", "building B" etc. as child locations, below each building I create "floor 1", "floor 2" etc. and below each floor I create rooms like "room 101", "room 207".

The challenge I got now is how to assign a room to a CI. When I open a CI and click on the magnifier symbol next to the location field, a huge list pops up showing all locations existing. No chance to search or filter within that list. Not feasible. 

When I start typing "room" into the location field it actually does show me rooms only. However: "Room 107" might exist several times in several buildings and cities. So it shows me several "rooms 107", but I cannot see which "Room 107" is the one from Hamburg. I would need to select each of the search results, then I'm able to lookup the details. And if I'm lucky, the first one I pick is the right one. Or the third. Or the tenth. Not feasible as well.

Any idea on how to tackle this? How are you doing this in your CMDBs?

[Roxann2]

We do not go down to the room # in our locations table; however, we do have a hierarchy setup.  Within that hierarchy, there is a naming convention that allows each location to stand on its own.  This will help with identification and stop duplications from happening.   If Hamburg is you highest level the location name would be something like HAM-BLDA-FL1-RM107.  This does mean you can't search for Room, but would need to search for *RM instead.  I don't know how many characters the Location Name field allows. 

[Ulrich Schulte]

This might be a good workaround, however as ServiceNow is actually able to show me the full "path" of a room in the format "Hamburg\BuildingA\Floor 1\Room 107" if I click on the details of a room, I wonder if I really need to go for a naming convention with abbreviations and codes. The issue is just, that the full path is not shown to me in the location lookup list.

[Ulrich Schulte]

It might help me already, if I could somehow use the location hierarchy window in a different way. When opening the location hierarchy lookup window, it shows me all locations existing (see attached). We do have a lot of them and the lookup list stops at the locations starting with the letter A. Seems there is a limit of the number of items to be displayed in that lookup list.

So "Hamburg" would not be shown at all. Increasing the limit would not really be feasible, as I would need to scroll down endlessly then. I tried to prepopulate the locations field with "Hamburg", "H*" and stuff like that and clicked on the magnifier symbol, but it always starts with A. Any way to filter, sort items in that big locations hierarchy lookup pop-up-window?

[mcarter89]

I am still learning here, but I believe there is a way to edit or programmatically manage the way the search works, and what supporting columns show up as you search. This is a screenshot of what I've been able to do so far. This is me searching for a building, and the 3rd column is showing the city the building is in. 

 

I would like to get to the point where a person could type any name that is a room, floor, building or campus and see multiple columns with details about each record returned. That way users can most easily choose the record that makes the most sense. We are also working to add not just the main location reference field, but also that location's full hierarchical name. That way when viewing a CI located in a specific room, the user can also see the hierarchical location that lists in our case - "Region/Country/State/City/Campus/Building/Floor/Room".

Would love to hear what progress you've been able to make on this initiative?