What method should we use to track wall jacks?

[ahbrook]

Hey all! 

I work for a mid-sized University. We have quite a few buildings around campus, each with their own floors, rooms, equipment, and so on. We also have a datacenter and quite a lot of networking closets. 

My employer has recently migrated over to ServiceNow ITSM. As I do more research, I am feeling that ITSM's delivered CIs are not the right thing to store our networking and datacom folks. I've been looking into the CSDM and other free options we can use, but everything keeps seeming to circle back to the Telecommunications offerings that ServiceNow provides - namely TNI and TSOM. 

With that said, I'm not sure how best to translate our biggest use case - wall jacks. My role is that of a systems architect, not a networking engineer, so I don't know if I even have the terminology right or if I'm looking in the right place. So I thought I'd turn to the experts. 

In our environment, I know the following:

• Networking tracks individual wall jacks in addition to the cables that run to them. 
• Networking bills the various units on campus based on if the jack is active or not, and what services it provides. They call these "service features."
• our General Ledger account numbers get tied to the jacks in our current system, so that billing for the service features and activation (and installation for new jacks) gets routed correctly. 
• It is not uncommon for us to install/configure 30-40 jacks at one time to fill out a switch. 
• We currently have over 53,000 "Network sites" in our CI Class Manager. I believe our implementer used this CI to track jacks, and added custom columns to represent data that should be in the relationships between jacks, cables, and services. 
• We currently have fields that allow for "Reservations" on jacks, cables, phone lines, and the like.
• I do not know what management tools Networking uses to track relationships between switch ports and physical jacks... But I believe there is something. 
• We also track cables, cable details, runs, and other elements and how they relate. 

With all that information, combined with my research into TNI, it sounds like you are generally supposed to offer "Data" services, and then associate that with networking equipment, cables, strands, and jacks. Then when endpoint or someone connects a workstation to a jack, the system should correlate the workstation to the service via the relationships involved.  But I am not sure. I am also worried that there is some crosstalk happening between assets and CIs in how our organization is discussing these things. 

So.. does anyone here have any advice or suggestions in this regard? If nothing else, I just want to know what CI Classes to stick jacks in. 

[ahbrook]

So having done more research into all of this, I think I have a better grasp on what I'm asking for?

It seems, based on what I am seeing:

• You set up a network site for a room, or possibly a breakout box on the wall
• You then create an asset for your keystone jack
• The asset gets associated with the network site and the cable/strand
• Then all that gets tied to the service (which can have billing or lifecycle status associated with it)

I think that the issue stems from our previous setup of tying services and functions to jacks, when it ServiceNow that gets tied to the site or to the cable or so on. Basically we were "overloading" the jack with info when the jack was just a common term folks used to talk about the circuits.