Models

The repository contains two types of records that describe the basic characteristics of IT products:

A model describes a product type that you have purchased or might purchase.
An asset, which is based on a model, describes a product that you own or plan to acquire. You can create many assets that are based on a single model, and the new asset inherits the model attributes. For example, if you own 100 laptops of a particular model, you would have one model record describing the laptop and 100 asset records describing the individual laptops.

A model can be any of the following examples:

A computer model such as Dell Optiplex GX270 and Dell Precision 410.
A hardware component such as 104+ keyboard, 256 MB-RAM, Monitors, and Intel Pentium processor.

You manage hardware models to describe the following models:

Configurations that the manufacturer offers.
Substitutions or additions that you typically make to the configurations when you purchase them.

Each model configuration is composed of links between the models and their component model records (such as a monitor and a keyboard).

You can have some products that you want to group together to manage as models, such as the following examples:

Standard, relatively inexpensive computer components in a configuration. For example, you can record a particular type of network card as a model. This model lets you determine which systems are using that type of network card without tracking details about individual network cards of that type. Other similar components include SCSI hard drives, memory, graphics cards, and CD or DVD devices.
Products that your company purchases from different vendors at different times. This additional information lets you track pricing information for those products and select the best price.

Define models first in the repository for each asset that you want to manage. After you define a model, the model acts like a template for the physical assets that are created. The assets inherit the properties or attributes from the model, such as the name, asset family, and manufacturer. By using this template, a single model can represent many assets and the model information is common to many assets. However, each asset record contains information specific to that asset.