User's Manual

Table 5-2 Reference Topics to Use for Building Inventory
Basic Modeling Advanced Modeling
See the “Building a Standard Active System Manager
Inventory” section on page 5-2.
See the “Using Resource Instances” section on
page 5-21.
See the “Using Resource Instances” section on
page 5-21.
See the “Using Resource Interface Types” section on
page 5-31.
See the “Using Resource Interface Types” section on
page 5-31.
See the “Linking Resources” section on page 5-36.
See the “Configuring Discovery Setup” section on
page 5-3.
See the “Linking Resources” section on page 5-36. See the “Linking Resources” section on page 5-36.
Building a Standard Active System Manager Inventory
5-2 Active System Manager User Guide, Release 7.1
Building a Standard Active System Manager Inventory
The Inventory perspective provides a simple user interface for you to model and populate your inventory
of equipment. You model your environment by creating and populating an inventory of all of the resources.
This inventory includes the various general resource types within your environment—the resource
types—as well as the specific resource instances that see a particular configuration for a particular piece of
network equipment. The Active System Manager software uses resource types as templates for resource
instances.
Table 5-3 outlines the typical workflow for building an inventory with the Inventory perspective.
Table 5-3 Building a Standard Active System Manager Inventory—Workflow Checklist
Task 
1. Evaluate your set of managed (physical and virtual) and control equipment in your environment. You should
consider all of your network servers, storage, and resource types (virtualized or not), the resource
characteristics you want to expose, and the resource and interface metadata information.
To jump-start your inventory-building process, click Setup -> Discovery Setup. Enter the required details
and click Discover to retrieve information about your network equipment. For more information about the
Discovery Explorer, see the “Configuring Discovery Setup” section on page 5-3.
2. Model the resource types for each type of hardware resource in your environment.
You open and modify resource types and resource instances in the Workspace area in the ASM editor. For
more information, see the “Using Resource Types” section on page 5-8.
3. Model resource instances for each piece of hardware in your environment. For more information, see the
“Using Resource Instances” section on page 5-21.
4. Model your network interface types. For more information, see the “Using Resource Interface Types”
section on page 5-31.
5. Create links for the actual network resources in your environment.
Such links enable resource instances to communicate with each other to describe the actual physical
resource connectivity in the environment. For more information, see the “Linking Resources” section on
page 5-36.