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

howard8 · ‎11-24-2014

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 · ‎11-24-2014

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].

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Community Alums · ‎11-26-2014

Howard,

It works perfectly fine. The software installations are operational data that is attached to the CI records. When it comes to SAM, the Asset is the Software License. Our counters do the work to correlate this information, and Software Licenses can be entitled to the CI record for machine based licensing.

Ben

howard8 · ‎11-26-2014

Thank you very much Ben,

I have asked so many times about this to my support people and they were as much in the dark about this as I was. It's all starting to make sense now.

Cheers,

Howard

Community Alums · ‎11-26-2014

You're welcome, Howard. We cover this in more detail in our Asset Management course and also have a couple of ITAM related Ask the Expert sessions coming up here on the community. I recommend both.

Best regards,

Ben

howard8 · ‎11-27-2014

One more question sorry. I have flagged Virtual VMware models and Virtual Microsoft models as "don't create assets" now, so I assume no new assets will be created when a CI is created. How do I delete the existing assets linked to virtual CIs? My understanding is that a normal deletion of an asset will automatically delete the coresponding CI.

Regards,

Howard

Community Alums · ‎11-27-2014

If you do not have any tasks or relationships associed with the items you need to remove, the easiest way to handle this would be to delete the asset and corresponding CI and have them discovered again. Otherwise you need to look at removing the connection between the Asset and CI so you can delete one without deleting the other. I need to check to see if there is a safe way to do this without possibly breaking future upgrades, but won't be able to get a good answer until next week. I tried some things out, but they were not working the way I expected when I tested them, so I need to get a better answer for you if this is the route you would like to take.

Ben