Assigning customers to actual CIs programmatically

When you import discovered configuration items, they are not associated with customers. You can programmatically assign customers to actual CIs using the cron task below.

The concept of assigning customers to actual CIs is to set the customer field on the actual CI, so that access to data belonging to different customers can be restricted to only people who have permission to see the customer's data (as established by the security settings).

In order to use this function, you must identify attributes that are present on your imported CIs that can reliably indicate which customer owns the CI. One possibility is to configure your IBM® Tivoli® Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) servers so that you have an anchor server for each customer's CI data. Then you can use the Address Space attribute to identify CIs belonging to customers using the Address Space setting you configured for each customer.

You can configure the cron task to identify actual CIs using any attributes that are present after the actual CIs are imported. These actual CIs will be assigned to the customer. Actual CIs related to the CIs found using the attributes specified may also be assigned to the customer by the cron task. You specify the rules to use to determine which related Actual CIs will be assigned to the customer as a cron task parameter.

You must assign the customers to all top-level actual CIs before you promote the actual CIs to create authorized CIs. The customer assignments are preserved when you promote CIs, so the authorized CIs are associated to the same customers as the actual CIs.

You can configure the cron task to run in preview mode. In this mode, the process will create a list of assignments, but will not modify the actual CI records. This enables you to test your configuration of the assignment process. You can use preview mode to verify that it maps actual CIs to the desired customers and adjust your configuration as necessary. When the preview shows the correct assignments, turn preview mode off to update the actual CIs. If incorrect mappings are made, you must manually correct them in the Actual CIs application.

You can specify that you want to assign CIs to a primary customer and additional customers. CIs that have already been assigned to a primary customer will not be processed by the cron task; no actual CIs that have customer associations are modified by the cron task.