CA Service Management

  • 1.  Configuration Item / Location best practice

    Posted May 08, 2017 04:09 AM

    Hi all

    I have a question about Configuration Item / Location best practice. Our organisation is a University. We have numerous buildings and in the buildings we have lecture venues. Lecture venues have AV Equipment and PC's, which are CI's on their own.

     

    We want to be able to report on calls per lecture venue. As I see it there are 2 ways to do this:

    1) Create a CI for each lecture venue. The CI would have class/family "Lecture venue" and then would be assigned to a specific location eg Building A

    or 

    2) Have a separate location for each venue eg A Building Venue 1

     

    I am leaning towards using the CI for this but I would like to get a sense if there is a best practice for this

     

    Thanks



  • 2.  Re: Configuration Item / Location best practice

    Posted May 08, 2017 08:59 AM

    Hi Graham,

    You bring an interesting challenge and point to the table on this one.  Most customers typically do this by using a "location" for each venue.  I find that using Classes/Families with CIs can start to get a bit more challenging and requires more setup time.  Being that you are a single location (meaning one campus - as far as I know), and not a company with multiple locations in different cities, states or countries, I think location would be your best bet.  What I would recommend, based on what I have seen other customers do is to use locations, and use a prefix for each building.  Here is a simple example to show this:

     

    Let's say its "Graham's University" - which has 2 buildings:

    1. Building1

    2. Building2

    Each of those 2 buildings has 2 Lecture Halls (locations):

    1. Building1:

       (1) Building1-LH1

       (2) Building1-LH2

    2. Building1:

       (1) Building2-LH1

       (2) Building2-LH2

     

    SO you would have a location for each building, and then another location with a prefix of the building - for each Lecture Hall within that building.

     

    Then you can attach the appropriate location to each CI.

     

    This way you can report on calls for each building, OR each lecture hall within each building, and by using the prefix, you can sort and would know what building it is.

     

    Now you CAN also do this just using the CIs themselves, but reporting may become a bit more complicated that way as you would have to add additional joins.

     

    Another way to do this would be to add another object called "Location Venue" - and make it have a "location"  or "building" filed that is an SREL to the Locations table, and a name field that denotes the name of that venue, and you can then add that field to CIs, or even to requests/incidents/change order forms, so that you can select a "Location Venue" for each ticket or each CI, and report on it that way.   Of course this requires a bit more customization and effort, but it can be done as well.

     

    Each of these are good, but if you are looking for the least challenging and fastest way to accomplish this, I would say using the existing Location field, but just creating the location venues using a prefix, would be the best.

     

    Hope this helps,

    Thanks,

    Jon I.



  • 3.  Re: Configuration Item / Location best practice