Understanding asset relationships is often critical to ensure efficient service management and service delivery as this information is used to assess the impact of change deployments and to perform root cause analyses of critical issues.
Since IT teams and asset managers have to deal with relationship data day-in and day-out, we have rolled out enhancements to improve the user experience for asset relationship maps.
Where do you find it?
- Navigate to your inventory and open the required asset.
- Click on the Relationships tab.
- Now switch to Mini map mode and click on Open full page map to view the complete map.
Visualizing Directionality in Asset Relationships
While visualizing asset relationships, their directionality is important to understand if there is an upstream or a downstream impact for an asset.
For instance, if Andrea’s laptop is impacted by an issue here, all the downstream relationships will be impacted as well, and all upstream relationships might be potential causes.
To ensure that this directionality of asset relationships can be easily visualized, Freshservice’s new vertical and horizontal maps clearly show the flow of dependencies and how a CI might impact the other CIs.
Relationship levels
Asset relationship information has a tendency to turn noisy and incomprehensible if it’s not viewed at the right level of abstraction. Freshservice’s asset relationship map now allows you to choose the number of relationship levels you want to view in your map. Each level will display both upstream and downstream relationships in that level.
Note: By default 3 levels will be displayed.
View Details and Associations
While viewing a relationship map, you might quickly want to deep-dive into the asset details or get insights about the issues (tickets, problems, changes, alerts) associated with the asset. To do this,
Click on the asset for which you want to view the details and associations.
Under Asset Details, you can find the impact, asset state, used by and managed by details.
Under Unresolved Issues, you can find open tickets or active alerts associated with the asset.
Creating Asset Relationships
When you onboard new assets, you will also have to set up the right relationships with the existing assets in your inventory to manage them efficiently. To seamlessly create such relationships right from the relationship maps,
- Hover over the asset with which you want to create a new relationship, and click on Add relationship. Alternatively, you can also click on the asset -> Add relationship.
Select the Type and the Asset with which you want to set up the new relationship with.
Select the upstream and downstream relationships and click on Add to create the relationship.
Other enhancements
All archived / deleted assets will be greyed out in the map view.
Scalable map with basic interactions like Zoom and ability to move the node around
