Mapping discovery categorization to product categorization
You can reduce failures during normalization by mapping product categorizations.
Map product and manufacturer aliases
In Product Catalog, you can create an alias for the Model
or ManufacturerName
attribute for a discovered or imported CI. This enables the Normalization Engine to find the product in the Product Catalog and normalize the CI.
In the normalization process, the Normalization Engine always checks for a Model
or ManufacturerName
alias. If the CI has a Model
or ManufacturerName
alias, the Normalization Engine replaces the CI's Model
or ManufacturerName
attribute value with the alias and searches for an entry in the Product Catalog.
The Version Normalization feature also uses manufacturer aliases to look up a matching Version Rollup rule for a CI. For more information, see Managing software licenses in your organization using normalization.
Map product categorization aliases
From the Product Catalog Alias Mapping form, you can map incoming CI categorizations for a discovered or imported CI to preferred categorizations for different reasons.
The product categorization aliases provide the correct categorizations either when the CI's Category
, Type
, and Item
attributes have no values or when they do not match those in the corresponding Product Catalog entry.
Best practice
Model
or ManufacturerName
attributes, even though the Catalog Mapping window allows you to map aliases in the Product Name and Manufacturer Name fields. The Normalization Engine always checks the Normalization Alias form in the first step in the normalization process.The Normalization Engine does not always check for product categorization aliases. Instead, it checks the categorization aliases for any of the following conditions:
- If the combination of the values of
Category
,Type
,Item
,Model
, andManufacturerName
is not in the Product Catalog data. - If the combination of values is in the Product Catalog but is not related to the company for whom the CI is being submitted.
For example, if you specify Desktop in the Category field in the Discovery Product Categorization area and Hardware in the Category field in the Mapped Product Categorization area, any incoming CI that has a value of Desktop for the Category
attribute is saved as Hardware for Category
.
You should also create product categorization aliases for CIs where the Model
or ManufacturerName
attribute has no value. For more information, see Normalization process.
When the Allow New Product Catalog Entry option is enabled, the Normalization Engine uses the product categorization aliases to create a Product Catalog entry when it does not find one for the CI.
To map discovery categorization to product categorization
- In the CMDB Portal, select Configurations > Manage Normalization Rules > Catalog Mapping as shown in the following figure.
- In the Catalog Mapping screen, click the ( + ) sign to open the page in which you can select a class for which you want to create the product alias mapping.
- Select the CI class from the drop-down list.
- In the Discovery Product Categorization section, select the categorization values of discovered products for the CI class you selected.
Specify a name for the product in the Product Name field.
In the Mapped Product Categorization section, select the categorization values that are applied to the discovered product when it is normalized. - Click Save to save the details.
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