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Chapter 6 ■ Service Transition
and finally retirement, is managed, controlled, and tracked in the SACM process.
Examples of service assets are monitors, laptops, datacenters, and servers.
A service asset is any resource or capability that could contribute to the
delivery of a service.
Not every service asset is a CI, but every CI is a service asset. A CI is the fundamental
component of a service that can be configured, tracked, accounted for, and controlled.
For example, in an e-mail server involving servers, routers, and exchange application,
each server, router, switch, application, and firewall can be called a CI. Why? Because
these CIs can be tracked, controlled, accounted for, and audited.
A configuration item is a service asset that needs to be managed in order
to deliver an IT service.
Who decides what can or cannot be a CI? It is at the discretion of the customer. If
the customer is willing to shell out more to control and manage deeper than the servers,
like the hard drive, processor, or RAM inside a server, then he might as well label them
as individual CIs. But it is not prudent to take the CI level as low as the components of a
server or any other equipment, as management then becomes complicated. Moreover,
when you plot the value generated against the depth of CIs, by going deeper into the
components, the value derived is negligible.
Every CI has a number of attributes attached to it. Attributes are various details
that get recorded against a CI, such as owner, location, date of commission, status, and
configuration. All these attributes are controlled through change management. This
means that if any of the attributes have to be changed, the configuration manager or
whoever wants to make the change should take it up with the change management
process team. Attributes on configuration items cannot be changed on the fly.
Figure 6-4 illustrates the attributes of a server.
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