Need help on how to set up Phone Systems in CMDB

[Micah Billman]

We recently transitioned our asset management to Insight.  We are a company with 1000's of stores and we are trying to find out how to best set-up our phone systems (PBX) in our CMDB.  There's 29 different phone system models.

Each phone system model has a combination of standard, display, and wireless handsets.

Each store has various counts of standard, display, and wireless handsets. Ex. Store 54 has Model X phone system with 9 standard, 2 display and 3 wireless handsets but Store 2043 also has Model X with 6 standard, 3 display, and 0 wireless handsets.  Another store could have 2 different phone systems (Model G and Model Y) with a combination of standard, display, wireless handsets for each system.

We don't keep track of serial numbers on these systems.

We have over 6000 systems deployed in the field.

Stores are a separate Object Type.

Not sure if this is enough info or not.

What's the best way to set these up in our CMDB?

[Carmen Nadeau]

Hi @Micah Billman ,

I don't know if you have done the exercise but you have to start with use cases regarding your inventory and those use cases will guide you on 

• Creating your structure for the schemas
• Knowing what to put into Insight
• How 

You have to have those other answers at a minimum if you don't have use cases:

• Do you need to keep the amount of one models associated to a store or do you need to create 1 object for each phone and associate the phone to a store ?
• Will the quantities be updated manually, by Rest API ? With a service request ?
• How do you need to use those object ?  again, available in a service request ? Only on report ?

After all this, personnaly, for your phone models, I would create a schema containing templates for all the different 29 models of phones with the attributes. This could become an attribute when creating the phone object, it is easier doing this like that instead of repeating every combination for each existing phone.

I hope my 2 cents will help you ;)

Carmen

[Micah Billman]

Thanks for your help!