What is the table cmdb_ci_alias uesd for

[John gmail]

Can any tell me what is the cmdb_ci_alias table used for, or how are you using this table in your environment?

[DaveHertel]

Hi John, As with many tables/components in SN platform, "it depends"... but from what I know of it from history, I 'think' its expectation was to track multiple name/flavors for same CI.  The schema bears this out too and you can see from this that DNS Alias table is subclassed from Alias. There is also no new fields introduced on Alias, so its pretty sparce.    Sooo.... its a apparent value (in my view) is to track other names (i.e. Aliases) for a CI.   My 2.5 cents.

Does this help?  Hope so...

[Jeff Currier]

The most recent use of this I was was to alias the Business Applicatiion Name where the application name was the CI.  In this case, The "Official" name of the CI was ABC, but everyone knows it as XYZ.  Thus when the user would call as say XYZ was down, the Service Desk agent couldn't find the CI,  With the Alias, the Service Desk agent would see XYZ, Pick that CI (alias) and the proper CI would get added to the incident

[Moe9]

Hello Jeff,

Do you have to add the field "Alias" to the Business Application form, for it show up as part of the record? Also, would this be a custom field, as I don't see it on Form Design...

[VaranAwesomenow]

Thanks, This is helpful, continuing the discussion, similar to how we have a child table for DNS alias under alias, if we need to store aliases for any other table, it would be prudent to create a child table under alias table and use it for that purpose.