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Building an object schema for IT Assets Management (ITAM)
Assets in Jira Service Management is a Premium and Enterprise only feature. Learn more about Assets.
How to use this guide
This step-by-step guide will walk you through setting up an object schema in Assets.
Each step will include detailed instructions about how to use Assets in Jira Service Management, and also some tips and best practices about how to get the most out of this powerful feature when using it as part of your team’s IT Asset Management (ITAM) process.
There are two types of information in this guide:
The headers with the blue background will help you get started in Assets. They will provide you with information about each step in the guide, including examples of data and how each feature can be used.
The text with the white background will give you a series of steps to help you navigate through Assets, or it will contain detailed information about an Assets concept.
And some notes about the text:
Information in bold indicates text that you will find in Assets itself, such as the name of a menu option, a feature you can toggle on and off, or a button.
Information in code is text that’s part of our example object schema for IT Asset Management (ITAM).
Information in bold italics is a concept or idea that forms an important part of Assets.
Navigate to Assets and get started
Assets in Jira Service Management is a full-featured CMDB that allows you to create and organise objects and configuration items that you use your IT assets management practice.
For example, you could use Assets to track a laptop in your workplace from when it is first ordered to when it assigned to an employee, through upgrades and repairs, and finally as it is decommissioned.
Let’s take a look at Assets now.
From your Jira Service Management screen, select Assets in the top nav-bar.
Understanding object schemas
You are now looking at the Object schema landing page, where you can see all of the object schemas in your instance and also search for specific objects and object types.
If you don’t see anything, its probably because you haven’t created an object schema yet - we’ll fix that in the next step.
But first, what is an object schema?
An object schema is a collection of information in Assets used to track assets, configuration items, and resources, and to understand and visualise the critical relationships between them.
Each object schema holds unique information in the form of object types, objects, attributes, icons, references, and statuses.
Each object schema is distinct, and limited information can be shared between two different object schemas. Each object schema also has its own set of permissions, which allows you to hide or show different information for different users or groups.
Understanding information architecture
One of the key concepts in Assets is information architecture, which is understanding and the best way to organise your data. In Assets, the information architecture is how you built object types and attributes to hold your data.
But what does a “good” object schema look like? In a good object schema:
Data is right-sized. Your object schema tracks every piece of important information, and nothing that is not important.
Data is unique. Your object schema doesn’t track any object twice. Duplication leads to errors and inefficiency.
Data is extensible. Your object schema is created in such a way that it can be easily extended, added onto, or modified to fit the needs of your team.
If this sounds kind of abstract and complex, that’s because it is! But lets’s take a more concrete look with an example from our ITAM object schema.
As part of IT Assets Management, we want to track all different kinds of IT Assets that we would find in a typical office - printers, laptops, monitors, and the like. We want to keep all of this information in a single place and make it accessible, and the container we use for this in Assets is called an object schema.
For each kind of object, we’ll want to track different details. For a laptop, we will need to know how much memory it has, while for a mobile phone, we might want to know the IMEI.
Thus, it makes sense to create different object types to represent a laptop, a mobile phone, or a printer.
Each of these objects has details that are important, for example, information about the processor, the RAM, the screen width, or the serial number. We need to track these details for each individual object, and these are called attributes.
Now, let’s imagine a single IT asset - a laptop. A single laptop has a large number of specifications we need to know if we want to track it - its model number, its CPU, how much RAM it has, the speed of the RAM, the size of the hard drive, the size and model of the screen, how many ports it has, and on…and on…and on. And now imagine that your company has 500 laptops.
That’s a lot of information to enter and track.
Luckily, in Assets we can speed things up by bringing in information from different sources. For example, we could bring in information about different models of hardware from our vendor’s database, and we could combine that with a listing of our current inventory.
That’s what we’ll do today. We will divide our object schema into two parent object types - Models and Hardware assets, from which all other object types will descend.
Models will hold information about the technical specifications of different types of assets - like a catalog. It won't be a listing of everything we have onsite, but a listing of every potential asset we might encounter. This information we can pull directly from a manufacturer or supplier catalog, and it won’t change very much.
Hardware assets, on the other hand, is our inventory. It lists only assets that we have onsite, and contains unique information about that asset - its serial number, its inventory number, who owns the asset, when it was purchased. This information will change each time an employee checks out a new asset, purchases something new, or breaks something.
Each Hardware asset will contain attributes with its own serial number, its stock number, owner, and a reference pointing to the Model. The Model for this asset will hold information like memory, manufacturer, and technical specifications.
Maximum information with minimum work - that’s effective information architecture!
Creating a new object schema
Let’s create a new object schema to hold all of the information for our IT assets management (ITAM) practice. Every object schema has a name, a key, and (optionally) a description.
Let’s give ours the name IT assets management and the key ITAM.
To create an object schema, you need to be logged in as a Jira admin.
Select Assets in the top navigation bar.
Select Object schemas.
Select Create object schema in the top right corner.
Enter information about your object schema, including:
Name - a name for your object schema.
Key – this is a unique key to identify your object schema.
Description - a description of your object schema.
Select Create.
Understanding object types
You are now looking at the object schema view. This view show all of your object types (on the left), as well as details about objects and their attributes on the right.
Our new object schema will hold information about all of the objects in our ITAM practice. To keep things organised, we will create some object types that we’ll use to define the details of each object.
An object type represents a group of similar objects in an object schema.
These objects share attributes, and other characteristics that make them useful to hold information about a certain type of asset or service.
Each object type can have a single parent object type and multiple child object types. You can configure inheritance so that child object types automatically receive the attributes of their parents and pass their own attributes to their children.
Similarly you can set some object types as abstract, meaning that they can’t contain any objects of their own but can pass their attributes to their children, who can themselves contain objects. Inheritance and abstract object types can be used to create object schemas that are both simple and powerful.
Creating object types
Let’s get started by creating our first two object types.
Our first object type will be called Hardware assets. We’re going to use this object type to hold all of the assets we will have in our inventory, and we’ll subdivide those into different object types as we work.
The second object type we will create will be called Model. This object type contain information about the models and specifications of our catalog of future assets.
We’ll do the procedure below twice - once for Hardware assets, and once for Model.
To create an object type, you must be logged in as a Jira admin or have Object Schema Manager permissions.
Select Assets in the top navigation bar.
Select an object schema.
In the Schema Tree, select the icon at top.
In the popup window:
Enter a name for the object type.
Select an icon for the object type.
Select a parent object type. If None is selected, the object type will be created at the root level in the object schema.
Enter a description for the object type.
Select Create. To create another object type immediately after, select the Create another checkbox then select Create.
Using inheritance to share information
Now we can see our new object type on the left side of the Assets screen.
Object types can have both parents and children.
Parent object types can be used to share attributes between object types, while child object types can be used to contain unique attributes that aren’t shared with other object types.
Let’s make Hardware assets and Model parent object types that can pass information to their children.
To force all children of an object type to inherit the attributes of their parent object type, you must be logged in as a Jira admin or have Object Schema Manager permissions.
Select Assets in the top navigation bar.
Select an object schema from the list.
Select an object type.
Select to the right of the object type, or select from the top-right of the screen.
Select Configure object type.
Under the Inheritance tab, select Pass all attributes to child object types.
Working with abstract object types
It’s important to note that the inheritance feature must be enabled before creating child object types - it cannot be enabled on an object type that currently has children.
Now that we’ve set Hardware assets and Model to pass attributes to their children, let’s set them to be abstract.
Abstract object types can’t contain any objects of their own. This means they can’t be used to store information directly, but it makes them an excellent way to share a common set of attributes between different object types. This can be very useful.
To disable the ability to create objects within an object type, you must be logged in as a Jira admin or have Object Schema Manager permissions.
Select Assets in the top navigation bar.
Select an object schema from the list.
Select an object type.
Select to the right of the object type, or select from the top-right of the screen.
Select Configure object type.
Under the Inheritance tab, select Set the object type as abstract.
Creating child object types
Now that we’ve created our parent object types - Hardware assets and Model- let’s create some child object types that will inherit information from the parent.
Create four new object types to appear under Hardware assets:
Phones
Laptops
Servers
Printers
Remember to select Hardware assets as the Parent for each object type. As soon as you create them, you will see them appear under Hardware assets in the left navigation bar.
Next, let’s create some child object types for Model:
Hardware models
Model categories
Software models
Remember to select Model as the Parent for each of these.
To create an object type, you must be logged in as a Jira admin or have Object Schema Manager permissions.
Select Assets in the top navigation bar.
Select an object schema.
In the Schema Tree, select the icon at top.
In the popup window:
Enter a name for the object type.
Select an icon for the object type.
Select a parent object type. If None is selected, the object type will be created at the root level in the object schema.
Enter a description for the object type.
Select Create. To create another object type immediately after, select the Create another checkbox then select Create.
Creating grandchild object types
Now that we’ve created parent object types and child object types, we can also create grand-child object types that can inherit attributes from both their parents and their parent’s parents. We make these in the same way that we created child object types.
Let’s create two child objects for the Servers object type, and set their inheritance to Pass all attributes to child object types.
Red Hat Linux
Windows Server
Remember to select Servers as the Parent for these two object types.
Now these two object types will inherit information from the Servers object type, which itself will inherit attributes from the Hardware assets object type.
To create an object type, you must be logged in as a Jira admin or have Object Schema Manager permissions.
Select Assets in the top navigation bar.
Select an object schema.
In the Schema Tree, select the icon at top.
In the popup window:
Enter a name for the object type.
Select an icon for the object type.
Select a parent object type. If None is selected, the object type will be created at the root level in the object schema.
Enter a description for the object type.
Select Create. To create another object type immediately after, select the Create another checkbox then select Create.
Good work!
We have the basis of our object schema laid out. We’ve created two parent object types called Hardware assets and Model.
Hardware assets will hold information about the different types of hardware in our inventory, while Model will hold information about all of the possible asset that we could have in our inventory. We’ve also created some child object types for each of these parents, and even some grand-child object types to hold information about specific kinds of assets.
Next, let’s move onto the next section in the guide: Creating attributes for IT Asset Management (ITAM).
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