Administration › CA CMDB Administration › Configuration Item List › Discovered Assets

Discovered Assets

CA SDM does not operate on the entire set of resources stored in any database; only configuration items (CIs) registered by CA SDM are immediately available. From a business process perspective, a help desk probably does not care about every device that may be on the network. It is only concerned about supporting owned resources that have become part of the organization through a purchasing process. For example, if a visiting consultant from an outside company plugs his laptop computer into the network, should this device automatically be entered into the help desk’s inventory of supported configuration items? Probably not. The collection of configuration items used by CA SDM are represented in the owned resource table: (ca_owned_resource).

You may need to track issues with configuration items that are registered in the database, but do not yet exist as owned resources. The Discovered Asset Selector allows the users to browse non-owned configuration item resource records in the database and transform them into owned resource records that can be used by CA SDM.

The information from the non-owned asset is merged with the CA SDM information into the same master record. If you search for Discovered Assets again, you can see that the original record has been updated to include the CA SDM information you entered.

To add a discovered asset

1. From the Configuration Item List page, click the Discovered Assets button.

   The Discovered Asset Search page appears.

2. Click Search to display the Discovered Asset List.
3. Select the asset from the list that you want to add as a configuration item, and then right-click the asset and select Create New Configuration Item from the pop-up menu that appears.

   The Create New Configuration Item page appears with information about the item populating some of the fields.

4. Complete any remaining fields that apply to the new configuration item and click Continue.

   Note: Only name and class are required values for creating a configuration item.

5. Enter data as required in the appropriate fields on the Attributes tab.

   The family of the class that you selected for the configuration item determines the attributes that appear on the tab. The information you enter here is determined by your business processes and the information you want to store and view for a configuration item.

6. Click Save.

   The discovered asset is added.