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

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howard8
Tera Contributor

‎11-24-2014 05:10 PM

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

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gyedwab
Mega Guru

‎11-24-2014 05:46 PM

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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howard8
Tera Contributor
In response to Community Alums

‎11-27-2014 08:05 PM

Thanks Ben,


I really appreciate you looking at this.   I am sure this would be useful for others also:



In terms of a Business Use Case, I'd like to be able to set up a non-admin Asset Manager user to do this sort of stuff. It's logical that discovery will create a CI-to-Asset pairing before the Asset Manager realises that the model needs to be "don't create asset", which means that there will always be the issue of removing the already created assets. Ideally the Asset Manager should be able to do this without asking for an Admin to do some clever scripting each time.



Looking forward to hearing you ideas.



Thanks again,


Howard


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