Create Assets object types and attributes
20 min
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Plan how to structure your Asset Management process
- Create an object schema
- Create and configure object types
- Create and configure attributes
- Configure Assets at the global and schema levels
- Create objects
Where do you start using Assets?
Before creating object schemas, you should plan the optimal schema configuration. Here are some questions you can try to answer as you develop your schema plan:
- What kind of data will you maintain in the schema? Are you tracking physical assets, logical assets, or people?
- What should be stored in a single object schema?
- What types of IT devices are important for us to track and manage?
- What do we need to understand about our IT devices to track them effectively?
- What do we need to track when onboarding and offboarding employees and contractors?
- What types of software licenses do we track (cloud vs. physical)? Do we have a good understanding of subscription licenses purchased versus assigned?
- What are the top services that are important to our business and who manages them?
- How can leadership and IT teams report on the assets deployed, who owns or was assigned assets, and assets' associated purchase orders and contract data to make key business decisions?
- Do we have a good understanding of the service taxonomy (the supporting service applications and infrastructure and their relationships)?
When planning your asset structure in Assets, start by identifying a clear use case. Practitioners should pinpoint areas with the highest service problems to ensure the asset structure addresses critical pain points and improves service delivery.
Once you have answers to these questions and a plan, you can start creating object types and populating your schema with data.
How should you organize your data?
Data that must be connected logically should be stored in a single schema.
👇Click the tabs below to explore several examples.
Assets for handling things like IT assets and services belong together in an ITSM schema.
Programmers or database administrators are accustomed to defining object structures, which makes them a valuable source of input and assistance.
Object schema templates
Assets comes with default templates for object schemas. If you want to skip the data structure building steps, you can use Assets object schema templates to generate object schemas that support your organization’s resource tracking. These templates contain a variety of object types based on your needs, giving you a head start as you build out an effective data repository.
Object schema templates come with the following:
- Object type structure
- Attributes for object types
- References between object types
To learn more about Assets schema templates, visit Atlassian Documentation.
How should you enter and maintain your data?
Consider how data is entered and maintained in the object schema.
👇 Click the boxes below to explore several examples.
Follow these best practices
These best practices will help you efficiently manage and organize your assets and configuration items within Assets, ensuring data accuracy and ease of maintenance:
- Start by populating Assets with a solid inventory of assets and configuration items focused on specific use cases. If you find yourself populating with items that don't tie back to your goal or use case, you are off track.
- Try to create general object types that multiple other object types can reference. This will make maintenance considerably more manageable.
- Avoid creating multiple object types for similar items when you can use attributes instead to maintain the differences. Reports, post functions, and automation rules will be directly affected by this and will be easier to maintain.👉For example: Instead of creating multiple Agreement object types to represent different types of agreements, create a single Agreement object type and use an attribute to indicate the type of agreement.
- Assets should have unique identifiers that don't change. The identifier needs to be unique so it can be differentiated from other assets and must not change so you can track the asset over time. We recommend establishing a consistent naming convention to improve the usability of asset data. Depending on the asset type, you can use a serial number, asset tag, asset name, or external system identifier.
- Assets and configuration items should have relationships. An infrastructure asset represents a component that needs to be managed to deliver or support a service. In other words, each infrastructure asset configuration item has a direct or indirect relationship with one or more service configuration items.
How do you create an object schema?
Once you’ve completed your plan, you’re ready to create object schemas. You can create an object schema from Assets’ main view.
In the Assets view, select the plus sign next to Schemas in the side bar. You’ll be prompted to select a schema template then enter a name and a description.
How do you create an object type?
Once you create an object schema, you can start creating object types.
- Create an object type: Select the plus sign at the top of the schema tree.
- Enter details: Provide a name and select an icon to create an object type. You can also select a parent object type and provide a short description. If this is the first object type in your schema, no parent object types will be available.
- View and reposition the object type: The newly created object type appears in the schema tree view. You can drag it to a different position in the hierarchy at any time.
👇 This is where you create an object type.
Using a strict naming convention for object types and attributes is beneficial. This will make creating search queries, which are case-sensitive, easier.
For simplicity and consistency, it’s recommended to use capitalized words and singular names. Regardless of your naming convention, you should be diligent about enforcing it. For instance:
- Title case: Business Service, Cost of License
- Singular names for object type: Computer, Employee
Creating an object type hierarchy
Object types are arranged in a hierarchy. The parent-child hierarchy is mainly used to visualize how object types are related. Inheritance enables an object type to inherit the attributes of its parent type.
This can help keep different objects separate but still make it easier to search since attributes will have the same names across both object types. Search queries can filter on one single object type or the object type and all its children.
You can also make an object type an abstract type, which prevents any objects from being created from this type. In this case, the object type exists to pass on its attribute values to any child type.
You can further configure object types by specifying role access to them. By default, object types inherit the same permission settings as the object schema, but this can be changed to grant access to specific object types.
Create and configure attributes
Once you create object types, you can start creating attributes.
👇 Click the icons below to explore how to create attributes.
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It’s not possible to set default values for attributes.
When creating attributes of type Status, set the type value by selecting one or more status indicators that users can use to set the attribute's value. The available status choices are configured in the object schema configuration.
Once you create an attribute, how do you configure it?
Additional configuration options may be available depending on the type and the type value of an attribute. If three dots are present for an attribute, click it and select Attribute settings to access the configurations.
👇 You can see where to configure an attribute in the image below.
What configuration options exist?
Depending on attribute type, specific configuration options become available.
👇 Click the boxes below to learn more about each configuration.
Attribute configuration best practices
👇 Click the boxes below to review some recommendations when creating and configuring attributes.
How do you create objects?
Once object types and attributes are configured, you can create objects. Each object is an instance of a single object type and contains values for all the attributes configured for that object type. There are a number of ways to create objects.
👇Click the boxes below to explore the different ways to create objects.
👇 This is where you create an object.
Making changes to objects
You may need to make changes to objects you have previously created, such as labels, attributes, or references. There are a number of ways you can edit objects.
👇Click the boxes below to explore the different ways to edit objects.
👇Watch this video to see how to bulk change objects.