Adding a Location, Corporate Unit, Cost Center, or User to an Inventory Device

IT Asset Management (Cloud)
You can set up various kinds of enterprise groups within your enterprise:
  • Corporate units
  • Locations
  • Cost centers
  • Categories.
Groups are hierarchical: Within each kind of enterprise group, you can create a hierarchical structure that represents your enterprise. You can then assign inventory devices, users, assets, licenses, purchases, and contracts to those groups. For example, you can assign an inventory device to a specific location, corporate unit, or cost center (or one of each simultaneously, if that suits your processes). Note that IT Asset Management does not assign these groups automatically; you must do it manually when adding or editing the properties of the inventory device, user, or license.

Creating new groups: New groups cannot be created during the assignment process described here. For group creation, navigate to Enterprise and choose the type of enterprise group you want to work with. In the listing of groups of that type, select the row for the parent where your new group belongs, and click the plain + icon on the right-hand end of that row. This creates a new child row where you can directly enter the group name and a description (the full path is completed automatically after you click the diskette icon on that new row to save the details).

Assigned user: For an inventory device, you can also specify an assigned user. This affects consumption calculations for user-based licenses covering software found on the device, overriding the values for calculated user and last logged on user that are determined from imported inventory.

Locations and regions: Locations are a special case when IT Asset Management is replacing ILMT as the source of sub-capacity points calculations for IBM PVU licenses (for more details on that configuration, see IBM High-Frequency Scanning). When this is true, an extra column for IBM region is displayed in the fly-down list of location search results. The link from inventory device through location to IBM region determines where the PVU points consumed by the inventory device on any IBM PVU license are taken into account: they help determine the peak value (and its timing) for that particular IBM region, and no other. Furthermore, any change in the assignment of an inventory device to a location (that impacts IBM region selection) has effect retroactively throughout the reporting period.

Virtual devices and inheritance: There are two ways you can organize your hosts and virtual machines within IT Asset Management:
  • The departmental model: Here, a host and all its guest VMs share common ownership details, as required when the entire host and its VMs serve a common departmental purpose (for example, an entire host dedicated to the HR Department).
  • The on-demand model: Here, a host is provided by a central resource such as your IT Department, and various VMs on the same host are charged back to different departments unrelated to the ownership of the host.
The choice between these two structures is made in the Inventory tab on the IT Asset Management Settings General page. The choices are universal for your whole enterprise (you cannot mix and match the models). There are two preferences you may set:
  • For locations: Set the check box for Update virtual machine location to match host location for the departmental model, where all guest VMs belong to the same location as their host. Clear the same check box for the on-demand model, where each VM may have a separate location assigned in its Ownership tab.
  • For corporate units and cost centers: Choose a setting for Update virtual machine cost center and corporate unit to match host properties:
    • Choose Always for the departmental model, so that all VMs inherit these groups from their host.
    • Choose Never for a completely on-demand model, where the ownership of each VM must be set independently.
    • Choose Only when virtual machine has no existing group for a convenient middle ground, where ownership of any individual VM may be set for the cost center or corporate unit of your choice (regardless of the ownership or changes for the host); but where any VM for which you have not yet set individual ownership inherits these group properties from the host. For example, if the host is owned by the IT Department, they might assign one VM to the HR Department, and another to the Marketing Department; but any unassigned VMs default to ownership by the IT Department, by inheritance from the host.

To add a location, corporate unit, cost center, or assigned user to an inventory device:

  1. Go to the All Inventory page.
  2. Click the inventory device to which you need to assign a location, corporate unit, cost center, or user.
    IT Asset Management displays the Inventory Device Properties page for the device.
    Tip: When there are several inventory devices that need the same enterprise group assigned, you may select multiple devices from the listing, and click Open. The special version of multi-device properties displays those values that are common across the devices you chose, and shows Multiple values for other cases. If you chose devices with multiple values for Location (when IT Asset Management is the source of sub-capacity points calculations for IBM PVU licenses), the IBM region property always displays Unresolved (for multiple locations). For performance reasons, IT Asset Management does not attempt to check the regional assignments of multiple locations.
  3. Click the Ownership tab.
  4. Click the corresponding text box to assign a location, corporate unit, cost center, or user and click Search. For details about using the search control, see To Use a Fly-Down.
  5. Select the desired location, corporate unit, cost center, or user record. If your enterprise groups are in a hierarchical structure, click + (at the left end of a row) to expand a level of the hierarchy.
  6. Click Add ... to add the selected entity to the inventory device.

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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