On Thursday, May 20, RightStar presented, a webinar, “How to Manage Your IT Assets with Jira Service Desk.” In that session we described how to manage assets and Configuration Items (CIs) using a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). We also discussed how to relate assets/CIs to incidents or problems, both from the customer’s perspective in the portal and on the agent’s side. Then we demoed how a CMDB is key to an integrated Problem, Incident, Change, and Configuration Management system.
The configuration management database (CMDB) should be the centerpiece of any large enterprise ITSM system. Indeed, the CMDB has been in use in most enterprises for as long as 15 years, but today often takes a back seat to more exciting technologies such as AI, automation, cloud, mobility, and security. Yet the irony of this is that a strong configuration management foundation and a clear understanding of the IT service dependencies and mapping is essential to key IT transformation initiatives such as DevSecOps.
In a webinar held last year, IT research firm EMA validated why an investment in a CMDB is so transformational to IT modernization projects. In their recent survey of mid to large enterprises, the following were top uses cases for a CMDB:
- Data center migration
- Financial optimization
- Security and compliance audits
- Performance related service impact
- asset management
- Change management/impact analysis
The great thing about Jira and Jira Service Desk is the ecosystem and large number of apps that are available in Atlassian’s App Store or Marketplace. Among the most popular JSD apps is the Insight CMBD by Mindville. Insight is an enterprise asset management CMDB for teams running Jira. It provides a structured and graphical representation of any data as a single source of truth. Insight works with any IT or non-IT related assets and will scale to support millions of assets.
Alan demoed Insight and how to define and configure asset categories or types using predefined or customized attribute types. Attributes give the power to relate assets to each other. For example, how the loss of critical disk drives may take a database instance down.
RightStar’s best asset management use case is a DOD customer. There RightStar assisted with the move from a legacy ITSM system to Jira Service Desk with Insight. We even wrote a script to archive all 88,000 old tickets and attachments into a read only Insight object schema. Benefits other than asset management, included: automated email, dedicated workflows for cyber security, integration testing, and tight integration between all systems and services.
Of course, a CMDB would not be complete without RightStar’s ScanStar barcode scanning. ScanStar allows inventory to be scanned and reconciled which helps identify missing and moved assets. Since not all assets are discoverable, an important component of asset management is the ability to manually and efficiently take inventory, and reconcile to a “single source of truth.”
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