In my last position, we used the machine's name in DNS as the CI name. That way, people see the CI in the way they're using to seeing it everywhere else. The important thing to note, if you do that, is that CIs really ought to have a unique identifier that stays with that CI forever and never changes. For physical servers, that might be your Tag Number. In our case, I used the CI ID field and wrote workflow that would auto-generate a new value for all new CIs, and we never changed it after that. You could potentially put the Tag Number in that field, and then create another class of "Tag Numbers" that you assigned to VMs to handle that scenario. You could format it in such a way that it's obvious whether it's a Tag Number for a physical system or a virtual one for VMs.
One big caveat with using names, though, is that names can change (hence one of the reasons for needing another unique ID to refer to the CIs, especially if you're going to refer to them from external systems), and you need to be extra careful with reconciliation rules (if you write any of your own), and may need to modify OOB ones, since it will by default match first on name. Lyle -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Greg Donalson Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 12:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: CI Name - Computer Systems Hi everyone, We currently have the CMDB installed, but are not using it to its greatest potential. We are only manually imported and updating the CI's as people see fit. The initial owner of this process had the Tag Number and the CI Name as the same thing - the tag number of the CI. Nice to have duplicate data! They now would like to change the CI Name to be something more meaningful: 1. As we are on 7.0 and it shows the CI Name in the CI Viewer 2. Because virtual machines do not have tag numbers What is everyone else using as the CI Name in the Computer Systems form? Thanks! Greg _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug10 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug10 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
