How to create new CI from an existing asset

[abusch]

I can't seem to find OOB UI actions for this use case, I can hack it together, but it seems like I'm missing something.

An existing database service was retired.   We re-purposed the hardware for another service entirely.   I would like to keep the old CI around for historical record keeping with it's host name, while linking the asset to a new CI with a new host name.

What's the the canonical way of accomplishing this?

Thanks,

Tony

[Community Alums]

Hi Tony,

Unfortunately, there is not a great way to do this today. You could try to unlink the current Asset and CI, but that is difficult to do and then would require you to create another new CI. This is a use case that is on our radar.

A couple possibilities here. You could use one or both. It wouldn't be the same as separate CI records, but could help you maintain the information you want:

• Because you are looking to maintain historical information, you could enable auditing (Enable auditing for a table in the documentation) on the CI table here, and simply maintain the historical changes for the record, such as name and status changes. This also allows you to see associated Incidents and Problems in a single location, too, which could be useful if you see similar issues even after a change in purpose.
• Use Change Management to track the changes from decommissioning to redeployment of the device into the environment.

I know it isn't exactly what you want to hear, but I hope this sparks some ideas for a possible way to manage this.

Thanks,

Ben

[abusch]

Thanks Ben,

Timely and well thought out, but doesn't exactly solve my problem.   Not your fault though.

I think I'll end up writing a simple UI action to decouple the two and link the asset to a newly created CI.   The old CI will not be associated with an asset anymore.

It doesn't happen for us often, but there are times when a bare metal server is reinstalled with a different OS for a completely different purpose.   It doesn't make sense in this case for the lifecycle of the CI to be continuous.

Thanks for your help!

Tony

[Community Alums]

Hi Tony,

I agree with you, and I have given this a fair amount of thought in the past. Another thing to consider is possibly keeping track of the former CI's relationship to the physical asset when your UI Action does its work. This could be achieved with a new reference field on the CI record called something like Original asset. When your UI Action runs, it could move the value from the Asset field into this new field. On the Asset record, you could add the related list to show past CIs associated with the Asset. This could be useful to be able to go back to review what happened with that CI in the past.

Good luck and let us know how things turn out. If I might make one more suggestion, perhaps you can submit an enhancement request for this capability, too.

Ben

[Teri Bobst]

Hi Ben, has any more improvements been made to this issue? I had a bad data import that created Assets without corresponding CI's. The CI's were then created from our discovery source, but they created blank Asset records.

I need a way to link the original Assets (created without CI's) to the existing CI's in order to maintain our historical information on incidents, change, etc.

Any suggestions to help? The only thing at this time I know to do is to manually add all of the asset information to the blank asset linked to the CI's, then delete the bad Assets. But - I have around 400-500 and this is going to take me forever to complete manually!

Thanks,

Teri