Confused as to why Assets and CIs are on different tables but with a 1-to1 mapping???

[howard8]

Hi All,

Can someone point me in the right direction here please?   We use ServiceNow for our CMDB/Discovery but have a financial fixed asset register (FAR) as part of our ERP.   I am planning to copy and synchronise the FAR information into Servicenow, by mapping FAR asset number to CMDB serial number.   My confusion around the table structure.   I do not understand why assets and CIs are on different tables, considering that an asset record is always created for every CI (apparently). If this is 1-to-1 data then why is it not on the same table. Also, why would I want an asset record created for a virtual server anyway? It is not a financial asset in our FAR. Many CIs are NOT financial asset yet they get an asset record whether you like it or not. Can this be controlled (e.g if virtual==true then don't create asset), or is ServiceNow's definition of an asset different to that of real financial asset.   I am struggling to make sense of this. It looks like I have to add a true/false field called "Is financial asset" to separate the real assets from servicenow assets.  

Am I looking at this incorrectly?

Can anyone shed some light on this or point me to some literature that explains all of this please?

Thanks in advance,

Howard

[gyedwab · Accepted solution]

The reason for the separate tables is that table structure in SN revolves around what kinds of information you want to store on each. For CI's, you want to track things that are specific to CI classes, so there's a table for Servers [cmdb_ci_server], for application [cmdb_ci_appl] etc. For Assets, you want to track them differently, based on whether they're hardware [alm_asset] or consumable [alm_consumable] etc.

The Model Category table is what maps the two: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Model_Categories

So there are some CI tables that don't create assets (application is one example), and there's asset tables that don't create CIs (consumables is one example). You can adjust the mapping.

Out-of-the-box, the Server table is mapped to Hardware, and Virtual servers are a subset of the server table. I'd be curious to know how other customers are getting around it -- I haven't tested remapping the model categories to tell the system not to create assets for the virtual server tables [cmdb_ci_ec2_instance, for example].

[howard8]

Thanks Guy,

Coincidentally this was posted just after my post "Discovery Sensor : Disable "is Virtual" from being an asset"

I'd also be curious to know how other people do virtual servers or computers.   If there was a way to not create an asset for VMs, would that prevent a software licence being linked to it, or are they linked to the CI.   If licences do link to assets then we have to have them for VMs, I guess, however "real assets" will therefore be a subset of the asset table. this will make reporting have to filer them out somehow.

Is there anyone out there with Virtual Servers and Asset Management? Did you prevent the CIs from having linked Asset records somehow, or are you ignoring the asset records with reporting filters?

[Community Alums]

Howard,

As you state in your initial post, not all CIs are Assets and not all Assets are CIs, so that is why the tables are separate. Guy covered some of the details around this. Model Categories are the key to managing the creation of Assets from CIs and vice versa. In the case of Virtual computers, you can override the creation at the model so you don't get assets for the virtual CIs you discover. I wrote a blog post on this (Models vs. Model Categories: Model Management, Part 2) and also answerd this in the Discovery Sensor post you referred to in your response to Guy.

Please let me know if you need some more detail on how to do this.

Thanks,

Ben

[howard8]

Hi Ben,

Now I understand that you can turn it off thanks. I am unsure what the impact of that might be. For example, in SAM can we link licences to a virtual CI that has no asset record?

thanks,

Howard