Working with CIs and relationships

You start by selecting a dataset in the search option. Based on the resulting list of CIs that are returned by your search, you can display, edit, delete, or expand those instances in the CMDB Explorer.

See Searching and viewing CIs and relationships in CMDB Explorer.

View the child and parent relationships of a CI.

You can view any destination CI in CMDB Explorer by right-clicking the CI and selecting Expand Children.

See Searching and viewing CIs and relationships in CMDB Explorer.

You can view any source CI in CMDB Explorer by right-clicking the CI and selecting Expand Parents.

See Searching and viewing CIs and relationships in CMDB Explorer.

You can view both the source and destination CIs in the CMDB Explorer canvas by right-clicking the CI, and then selecting Expand Both.

See Searching and viewing CIs and relationships in CMDB Explorer.

Group Selected CIs

You can group CIs of the same class (that is, the common children CIs) related to a parent CI in CMDB Explorer.

See Searching and viewing CIs and relationships in CMDB Explorer.

You can create a CI manually in an existing service model and add a relationship to that CI. This CI can belong to either a production dataset (BMC.Asset) or to a non-production dataset. For more information, see:

Creating a CI in an existing service model

You can create CIs in a non-production dataset, and then build the service model for these CIs. For more information, see:

Creating a CI for a new service model

You can add a relationship between two CIs.

See Adding a relationship between CIs

You can promote changes from a Sandbox dataset to production

See Promotion of changes from a Sandbox dataset to production

Compare a modified CI with the production CI

After you select a CI from the search results, you can view the CI in the CMDB Explorer. You can compare an instance in the Sandbox with the BMC Asset dataset, open the CI in CMDB Explorer and then select Show CI Details.

See Comparing a CI in any dataset with Asset dataset

Edit an instance of a CI

After you select a CI from the search results, you can view the CI in CMDB Explorer. For a non-production dataset, you can directly edit the CI, but for the production dataset, you can only view but not edit a CI directly. When you try to edit a CI from the BMC.ASSET dataset, the CI is opened in the Sandbox dataset.

Note: You cannot edit service CIs and relationships, which should be modified in the Service Catalog.

See Editing CIs and relationships in BMC CMDB Explorer

You can modify the relationship between two CIs.

See Editing CIs and relationships in BMC CMDB Explorer

Delete CIs

You can delete a CI by marking it for Mark as Deleted.

For more information, see Deleting CIs in CMDB Explorer