How to classify Network Appliances (I'm not talking about NetApp devices)

[Cedric Creton]

created 3d ago in ITIL

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Hello, we have several kind of specific network appliances (storage controller, antivirus, mail relay...) (physical & virtual) most of the time locked out of discovery or (linux boxes secured by vendors - no discovery account allowed)  Sometimes we can discover them by SNMP but the question of the class to assign remains.

I just found 2 classes:

cmdb_ci_net_app_host & cmdb_ci_net_app_server

-Can we use that for all our non usual appliances (I men not router/firewall/switch/WAP)?

-cmdb_ci_net_app_host for virtual ones?

-cmdb_ci_net_app_server for physical ones?

Is it the right choice or is better to create a new custom class (with a field to segretate Physical/virtual)

Thank you in advance.

Best Regards

Cedric

[robertgeen]

I would recommend creating a custom class for this. Quite often people need to create an appliance class and those classes you mentioned aren't for this type of data. You could use the is virtual flag to tell whether it's virtual or physical and just have 1 class but it all depends on how you know whether it's virtual or not (if it's by OID for SNMP then probably best to have 2 separate classes). Hope this helps.

[doug_schulze]

+1 to what Robert says and where these classes reside is very important.  Look at the attributes you are going to want to collect from them and determine if extending just hardware for your class or perhaps network gear would be the best choice.. my first guess would be netgear.. but you'll have to make the best determination. Certainly, start at hardware (cmdb_ci_hardware) and work down from there for a new home

[Marc Halleux]

Hi Robert,

Do you know what those 2 tables are used for?

-cmdb_ci_net_app_host

-cmdb_ci_net_app_server

BR

Marcus