Interoperability Guidance when using multiple CA products

The shared asset table, managed assets, and update restrictions

When running multiple CA products, it's common for them to share the same database, the MDB. Within the MDB, the most notable shared table from an AssetTrack standpoint is ca_owned_resource. This table stores the assets. Different CA products interact differently with assets, and you should examine CA documentation for further details. This article offers guidance about certain pitfalls that can be encountered when integrating AssetTrack with an MDB that backs multiple CA products.

Product

Relationship with ca_owned_resource records

APMAPM is used for IT asset management, which is concerned with tracking financially significant assets. Such assets are referred to as managed assets. APM is concerned about tracking what a managed asset is (i.e. model), what its location is, what its currently lifecycle status is (e.g. Ordered, Received, Active, Disposed), who is assigned to it, who is financially responsible for it, etc. If a given asset is not financially significant (e.g. mice, keyboards, small peripherals), APM usually doesn't track them.
Service Desk and CMDBService Desk and CMDB are concerned about IT service management. It looks at hardware and software as configuration items (CIs). It cares about the business impact of a changes to CIs. For example, an company Exchange Server is a CI. If it fails, email services will likely be interrupted, impacting the business. If a piece of hardware doesn't significantly impact the business, then CMDB usually doesn't track it.

 

This diagram illustrates how APM and CMDB/Service Desk view assets differently for different purposes.


Referring to the diagram above, for the items that don't overlap into the "both" section, there's no problem with interoperability - they can share the ca_owned_resource table in the MDB; APM and SD/CMDB will be like ships in the night as far as these non-shared records. The complexity arises for assets that fall into the "both" section. For example, if there is an expensive server that is a company domain controller, both APM and SD/CMDB care about it for different reasons, and they both need to act on it for different reasons.

CA's guidance on shared assets

  1. When initially creating the record, create it in APM. The reason for this is that there are a number of fields (notably model) that are critical to APM but that CMDB doesn't care about.
  2. Once created in APM, designate it as both a "Managed by APM" and a CI.



  3. When an asset is specified as "Managed by APM", edit access to this record is restricted so that only APM can modify most of its fields. This is obviously a problem for CMDB users because they need to be able to act on the record too. You must lift this restriction in order for CMDB to be able to update the record. You can do this within Service Desk and CMDB using a setting called "allow_unrestricted_asset_upd". By setting this to "Yes", you allow SD/CMDB to update assets.

 

Relevant AssetTrack settings

When integrating with AssetTrack in these situations where there are multiple CA products in the mix, you often will want to control:

  • which assets are being imported into AssetTrack
  • How new assets will be created in the MDB by AssetTrack.

By using the settings below, accessed from AssetTrack Server's "Settings" section, you can specify how AssetTrack will interact with regard to shared assets.