ITAM/APM: Best Practices when working with Global Configurations

Products

• CA Service Management - Asset Portfolio Management

Issue/Introduction

A global configuration with specific fields displayed/hidden and extended fields defined on the asset details screen has been created to apply to either a specific Asset Family or all Asset Families. When logging in as a user (non-administrator role), the global configuration is no longer applied as expected. It is only being partially applied.  Some of the fields that are meant to be hidden are being exposed to the end-users.

 

The given roles that the users belong to do not initially have a local configuration that could override the global configuration.  The intent is to have the given global configuration apply to all such roles by default.

Environment

IT Asset Manager (ITAM) 17.x

All Supported Operating Systems

Resolution

Generally speaking, it is not advised to define a global configuration to apply across all roles and avoid using local configuration, especially if the global configuration was intended for all Asset Families.  The reason for this is that while such a strategy could allow a single point of administration, basically update the one global configuration which could then apply across all roles, it also presents a single point of failure.  If the given global configuration is corrupted or an error is introduced, then ALL roles that do not have a local configuration may be immediately affected.

The best strategy is to have Global configuration setup to have all hidden fields exposed, as well as define all extended fields, then create a local configuration per role to apply the specific settings needed per role, such as hiding select fields. Local configuration would be derived from the initial global configuration setup.

Additional Information

Global Configurations cannot be deleted if any extended fields have been defined.  This is by product design.

Local Configurations can be deleted.  This allows for more flexibility and ease of maintenance.  If the local configuration becomes corrupt, one has the option to simply delete the local configuration and recreate it from the global configuration to start over.

See also existing documentation on configurations