How are you handling "Appliances" in your CMDB?

[jcoady]

How are you handling "Appliances" in your CMDB?

[A Westervelt]

Can you give an example of what you mean by an appliance?

[jcoady]

We have a Websense system which is comprised of 3 Servers and 8 appliances located between 2 of our data centers.   The appliances are used for content filtering and is considered an "Appliance".   I'm just trying to figure out if we should just create a new classification and device type for these types of things or if there is a better way to keep track of them and link them to the servers.   Any ideas?

[Stijn Verhulst3]

Hi Juli,

I did a Discovery project at a customer a couple of months ago and they also ran multiple Appliances. These could be found via Discovery (= IP scanning) but not actually discovered. So we had only an IP-address available for most appliances.

So they decided to look at each case individually and to define them in the CMDB manually. Therefore we've created a new class u_cmdb_ci_appliance (child of the cmdb_ci class). These appliances could than also be linked to servers, virtual machines (some automatically in combination with Discovery, others manually).

Maybe it's even possible to discover these appliances and retrieving information from them via Webservices although that's dependant from the possibilities the vendor has provided.

Thus I believe it can be definitely worthwhile to create a seperate class. How they must fit within your CMDB hierarchy is up to you to decide and the decision also depends on your data model you want to define.

For example; you can create a new class for the Appliance & create subclasses as well for each seperate type of appliance in case all the subclasses have common attributes, which in their turn of course must be defined in the Appliance class.

In my humble opinion, there is currently no better way to keep track of them.

Hope my input will help you forward.

Kind regards,

Stijn

[Phil32]

We have multiple Windows and Linux appliances provided by many different vendors, and have credentials for logging into all of them.   However, those credentials will only work on an individual system.

How do you add the credentials for discovery to use, while not clogging up your credentials table with accounts that will not work on more than a single system?