hi everybody my name is david deich and i'm an advisory solution consultant with servicenow and today i'm going to talk about asset management versus configuration management in your cmdb on the now platform first i want to start off with the environment we're going to look at about six or eight months ago i said i'm gonna do this old-fashioned way i'm gonna draw a picture of my virtual environment all the esx hosts my vcenter my shared storage and all the applications that are running on each of these different servers and hosts what you're looking at is a picture of that environment once i spent hours making this the next day i actually added another esxi host and would have had to update this diagram instead i decided let me see what servicenow can do if i get a servicenow instance and discover my environment so today we're going to be working in a very clean instance dbd 1g demo and the first thing that we're going to see is a list of assets we can tell that because the table name is alm asset this is where servicenow holds asset entries notice we have 22 of them that are related to my lab we have those esx hosts that we were looking at we have windows servers we have switches and routers we have a firewall each of these assets does associate with a configuration item because these are hardware assets depreciable generally an asset is going to associate associate with some level of cost next thing we're going to look at is the configuration items in servicenow again notice we have 22 assets discovering this lab environment and a side-by-side aws environment we have 1758 configuration items for 22 assets and then going one step further we have 2400 relationships between those configuration items as i start to discover more and i start to service map we'll see our ratio of relationships to configuration items increase even further but as a general rule of thumb you should always have substantially more configuration items than you do assets and you should have more relationships than you do configuration items that can be some more like we're seeing in this instance or substantially more as we would see in a further built out and developed instance if i go ahead back to my asset list let's go ahead and look at my core switch i'm going to go ahead into this asset entry and we can see that on the asset table begin with alm this is where we can track our financial information disposal and depreciation any contracts are entitlements and any expense lines or sub assets like a module that's associated with it and we have a direct link to our configuration item and this is where we start to capture more of that it centric information where we have an ip address where we have information what oid we used and all of the relationships that are built out automatically by servicenow and are part of your cmdb and we can see things like switch ports or device neighbors using cbp and lldp and after servicenow discovers all of this servicenow is able to very quickly load this into a picture for you in a dependency view so you can see how this switch relates with other switches or esx hosts or network adapters or application services back to that vcenter that we started with see a vmware vcenter data center called david house again we've discovered all those relationships that i was trying to sit there and draw out and i can look at our dependency view again and all of the information that i need about configuration and how all the things in my system attach to each other is in one nice picture all of the relationships between all of these configuration items and if there's just too many we can always filter out some of these ci's by type getting rid of some of the disks and the data stores and the resource pools network adapters starting to really get a much cleaner view of what's going on i hope this has kind of given you a very good and brief overview of what's going on in servicenow and how servicenow treats assets versus configuration items differently and why your cmdb is not just a list of your assets but so much more thank you all for taking time to watch my video and i hope you have a great day