Creation of hardware CIs in the upcoming Dublin release

[aleck_lin]

I have heard in the past from our professional services folks who wanted to implement some type of approval process when a new CI was created by Discovery. I don't remember all the details, but it was something along the lines of setting a business rule on the hardware table to either reject the CI creation or create some type of notification. It was a good idea, but it would've never worked because the underlying implementation of how Discovery created a hardware CI was done in multiple stages, and the first stage would create the CI with nothing (no names, serial numbers, IP address, models and etc) but default values. This made it impossible to inject a before insert business rule to really do anything useful.

Starting with the upcoming Dublin release, I've refactored the underlying code that creates a new CI so that it when the CI is being created, it contains as much information as possible up to the point of the identification phase, so this means things like name, serial number, ip address and etc are available. I've attached a screen shot of what it might look like in the history audit.

This is a fairly small change, but useful because this means that if you understand how to implement a probe and add it to the identity probe and parse the information you need in a identity sensor, then that information would be available during the creation of a new CI. Hopefully this will allow people to implement business rules they previously couldn't.

If this bit of information is relevant to you, let me know and I'd love to hear your feedback.

Thanks