Difference between related list and related item service now

[wac]

Hello!

I've troubles understanding the difference between a related list and a related item.

I have a hierarchy of locations (User Administration -> Location):

City -> Building -> Floor -> Room

And I have several network segments (Configuration -> Networks):
•10.0.1.0/24
•10.0.2.0/24
•10.0.3.0/24

The Problem is that sometimes a network segment is reserved for a room and sometimes it connects to a whole building (therefor many rooms and floors).

My plan was to build a many to many connection (sys_m2m) and have them represented by a related list.
Is this a good way, though? Should I use related items instead? What is the difference?

Thanks for your help,
Chris

[tony_fugere]

The Related Items are for relating CMDB CI's to CI's. These relationships are visually represented on the Business Service Map and can be used with components like the CIUtils to automatically find CI's that are upstream or downstream from a CI.

The Related Lists are for relating any object to any object in ServiceNow. These relationships are not visually represented on the BSM viewer. You still get the benefits of having the two objects linked. This is great when the two records are not CI's or do not need representation on the BSM.

[wac]

Thank you for your answer.

If we have a look at the default Service-Now CMDB structure, we can see that Network-Adapters and Computers/Desktop/Servers/Printers are stores separately and then put into relation using a related list.

Would you recommend changing this and using related items instead?

Thank you for your help,
Chris

[tony_fugere]

I would use the related lists only on those. There is likely little to no gain in having NIC's display on the BSM. If you do need NIC's on the BSM, then you can build relationships in addition to the related list. If that is the case, I'd use both. Same goes for the rest of these classes.

Point of the story here is "it depends". It all depends on what you need to meet your requirements. Where related lists are used, it's handy for smaller components that represent CI's that exist, but may not be necessary for a successful BSM.

[wac]

Thank you very much for the clarification.
--
Chris