Integrating with CA CMDB › How to Set Up the Integration › Associate Services with Configuration Items

Associate Services with Configuration Items

Associating services with configuration items is a required major task to configure the integration between CA CMDB and CA Service Catalog. You could potentially create hundreds or even thousands of associations, but you should create only the associations that support your business goals and needs.

Before associating a service to a configuration item, ensure that the service is defined in CA Service Catalog, meaning that the service's service option groups and service options have been specified. For details about defining services, see the Administrator Guide.

Note: If you associate a CA Service Catalog service with a CA CMDB configuration item that does not display the Attributes tab, you cannot view the service-related details of the configuration item from CA Service Catalog. For details, see the CA CMDB documentation.

To associate services with configuration items

1. From the CA Service Catalog home page, select Catalog, CMDB CI Association.

   The CMDB CI Association page appears.

2. Under the line "The current business unit is: business-unit-name," click the Catalog tab.

   The list of existing folders, sub folders, and services appears.

   Note: If you know the name of the service or folder that you want, you can optionally use the Search tab (instead of the Catalog tab) to display services.

3. Expand the folders and sub folders as needed, until the services you want appear.
4. Check the box next to (on the left side of) the service or services that you want to associate with one or more configuration items.
5. Click the right arrow next to the Selected Services box.

   This action selects the services. The names of the selected services appear in the Selected Services box.

6. Click Next.

   The screen refreshes, and the CI List for Association appears, displaying the names of the service that you selected in the previous step. The services are listed in the service column. If any service is already associated to one or more configuration items, the item is listed next to the service in the CI Name column.

   You can associate each of these services (either individually or as a group) to one or more configuration items.

7. Check the service or services that you want to associate to one or more configuration items in the same action. Leave any other services unchecked; you can optionally associate such services to configuration items in a separate action.

   Note: To create a configuration item for each selected service and associate them, click Create CI, as explained in Create a Configuration Item for a Service and Associate Them. If you click Create CI, new configuration item is created for each selected service. Also, a one-to-one association is created between each service and its new, same-named configuration item.

8. To associate a single service with a one or more existing configuration items, do the following; otherwise, skip to the next step.
   1. Check the service and click Associate CIs.

      The CI List dialog appears.

   2. Click Search to display the available configuration items. Optionally use a search string to delimit your search results.

      The search results appear.

   3. In the search results, check all configuration items that you want to associate with the service that you checked, and click OK.

      If you selected only one configuration item, a one-to-one association is created between the checked service and that item.

      If you selected two or more configuration items, a one-to-many association is created between the checked service and those items.

9. To associate two or more services with one or more existing configuration items, do the following; otherwise, skip to the next step.
   1. Check the services and click Associate CIs.

      The CI List dialog appears.

   2. Click Search to display the available configuration items. Optionally use a search string to delimit your search results.

      The search results appear.

   3. In the search results, check all configuration items that you want to associate with the services that you checked, and click OK.

      If you selected only one configuration item, a many-to-one association is created between the checked services and that item.

      If you selected two or more configuration items, a many-to-many association is created between the checked services and those items.

10. When you are finished associating items, click Save.

Your associations are saved. They are used to help support and customize impact analysis, root cause analysis, and other analysis functions for your integration between CA CMDB and CA Service Catalog.