Using IP Address CMDB Class (cmdb_ci_ip_address) as opposed to the IP Address attribute

[Jacques Clement]

Hi Community,

I keep wondering what an interesting use case is for using the cmdb_ci_ip_address CI Class as opposed to just store the IP address as an attribute of e.g. the Server Class?

I suppose there is a valid story behind this, but just can't think of any by myself.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[CasperJT · Accepted solution]

Hi Jacques,

The IP address table allows you to reference an IP from a network interface card (NIC), which can then reference a computer.

This is especially relevant when you have multiple NIC's on a machine (which is most often the case).

For eaxmple my PC has had 3 IP addresses recently (one from my VPN and two from my internal NIC). This is of course more static for a server, but for PC's it can allow for deeper analysis in case of a security breach (for example).

This data is all automatically populated, I would not recommend populating it manually. Currently I have 135K records in this table (cleaned up regularly to avoid stale records).

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Casper

[dmorgan_isc]

Hi CasperJT,
Can i please ask for more information on how you clean the IP addresses. We are very new in our SN journey and have SCCM Service Graph setup. It looks as though we have >40K stale IP addresses with no idea how to clean this up?

[CasperJT]

Hi Morgan,

Depending on your policies and preferences you can consider running a scheduled job that deletes stale IP's after xx amount of time. Alternatively you could archive them, if you want to keep them for historical purposes.

[Anshu10]

Hi @CasperJT ,

i have 2 questions - 

Would you please help me understand the logic you used to clean up the ip address table?

I am looking for a valid reason why should i keep 6 IPs for a single CI in this table? I checked the autoflush table which is created for ip address table, it only deletes the data where install status is absent( which is not useful in my case since its only bringing 60 records.) I also want to understand the logic of install status on ip address table.