Special assets

Peter_Miklian

Hi,

I'd like to know how do you track special assets in SCSM.

I mean objects like SSL and bought personal certificates, internet domains, Azure subscriptions, etc.

They have costs but cannot be put any of existing asset types (hardware, software, license, consumable).

Did you extend any of existing classes (which?) or authored brand new class containing attributes relevant for given asset and your organization? Or don't you track such assets at all?

Thank you for all real life experiences and theoretical suggestions, too 😉

Adam_Dzyacky

Well, I'll call out two and how I've gone about them:

• Azure resources
• Certificates

For anything Azure related, I used the Azure Management Pack for SCOM to perform my discovery and lookup. This was an easy way to retrieve Resources Groups, hosted SQL, their associated tags, etc. Bring the same MP into SCSM and then those configuration items float their way over. But once you have these, things can go a few ways from here:

• VMs are Services, but probably already Windows Computers because they are domain joined. If they aren't domain joined with no plans to make them domain joined - then make it a Hardware Asset.
• Resource Groups, are...well Groups. They're not a service, so much as an (Azure) concept. I'd be less inclined to try to fit this into the Asset world.
• Subscriptions, I could argue you leave them as their native Azure class and relate them to an Asset Invoice/Purchase Orders. They are unique, re-occuring Config Item cost that relate to many Azure concepts. (Resource Groups, Services, etc.)

When it comes to Certificate management, I've been a fan of the following free SCOM Management Pack for cert expiration monitoring. While its core Alerting purpose works as intended, its secondary purpose as floating Certificates into SCSM is also reallllly awesome.

• Almost in the same vein of Azure Subscriptions, you could just leave them as their native class but then relate them to a re-occurring Invoice/Purchase Order depending on if the cert is external or not.

The SCOM takeaway here is that it's being used more as a delivery vehicle of Configuration Items to SCSM rather than being Alert/Incident in nature (but that part rocks too!). Best of all - with either MP imported, they are simply more classes that you could enable for Global Search, the Platform, and oData to get/update as you see fit through the Platform API.