In a conversation a few days ago, one of our customers said to me, a little wistfully, "I really like Service-now, but I sure wish there was a way for me to see the exact things I want to see..."
Well, I know a challenge when I hear one! So naturally I asked for an example — and she gave me her top priority: she wanted to be able to see all of her servers that were running as VMWare instances. She noted how we would show her all servers, or just Windows servers, etc. — but not servers with any OS running in a VMWare instance.
So I showed her how to do it. It took all of about 30 seconds, and then she made about five more such "views" on her own. Each of these show up as a module within the Configuration application. Here's how we made her VMWare instances view, step-by-step:
Right click on the application you want to add a module to. In our case that was the Configuration application (see screenshot at right). Then left click on the Edit Application pop-up menu item.
Look at the list of modules that are part of this application, and decide where you want your module to show up (see screenshot at left). This is easier if you sort the list by the Order column, as you see here highlighted in green. In our case, we wanted the new module to show up after Groups (number 70) and before the following separator line (number 100). So we decided to give our new module an order of 90. At this point we're ready to make our module, so we clicked the New button.
Now comes the fun part (see screenshot at right) — actually making the module! We gave it the title we wanted (VMWare Instances), set the order to 90, and set the type to List of Records. Then we chose the Server table to show (highlighted in orange), because we want to show records of any kind of server. Then the only tricky bit: setting the filter (highlighted in green). For this, we had to know some piece of information that would let us filter only the servers running on a VMWare instance. This turns out to be the manufacturer field being set to VMWare — but there are several variations in spelling of that company name, depending on which version of VMWare you're running — so we built a filter that would accept any of them. That's all there is to it — so we clicked the Update button.
A few seconds later, the menus on the left redrew themselves (this happens whenever you modify an application), and now the Configuration application showed a VMWare Instances module (screenshot at left). So we clicked on our new module, and...
Voila! We got a nice list of all the servers running in VMWare Instances, much like the one at right.
You can use this same general approach to create new modules in any application, but this capability is particularly useful in the CMDB — just about every organization has something special they'd like to see. I've run into quite a few of these needs — specialized label printers, "portable&rdqup; printers mounted on carts, non-Cisco network gear, specific models of laptops, and servers with more than 4GB of RAM are just a few of the examples I've heard about. I'm sure you could add some more!
