CIs vs. Assets
A question that I have been asked is “Why do you call some things assets in Visible Ops?” I must step up to the plate and admit that I am the culprit behind that non-ITIL wording. At the time, I didn’t understand the important difference between assets and Configuration Items in relation to Configuration Management. Today, I must admit that there is a huge difference and take a moment to explain.
Asset management is typically an accounting-oriented task associated with explaining who has what capital asset, what it was purchased for, from who, and what the book value is. Furthermore, it usually involves assets over some monetary threshold because accounting doesn’t depreciate assets under some amount - $1,500 for example.
Configuration Management is as different as night and day. It wants to track everything and especially their relationships to one another. Hardware, software, people, environment, data (files, tables, databases, structures, etc.) and services are all examples of configuration items (CIs) that one would expect to find in a configuration management database (CMDB). The CMDB then stores relationships between the various CIs so people can see what CIs comprise a service, what Incidents are related to what Changes, what Changes are related to what CIs, what are the child CIs of each CI and so on. Think of each category of CI has a database table being used to logically model the world of IT in an organization.
Moving on, for each CI, there are attributes that provide descriptive data to help the organization run. It can readily include accounting information, characteristics (memory size, drive space, MAC address, etc.) and status (purchased, in development, testing, production, retired, disposed of). The required attributes comprise the fields in our CI tables.
It is up to the business to determine how to design the configuration management data to logically model and support both IT and the business. For example, in Visible Ops, we are very interested in understanding the relationships of one CI to another, tracking Changes, having documentation, being able to track performance and undertake audits, all of which a properly designed and utilized CMDB can handle.
Thus, there is a big difference between assets and CIs. At some point, I’d like to replace the word “asset” with “CI” throughout the book to better reflect the role and benefits of Configuration Management.