hi I'm Kevin willamowski Senior outbound product manager in the Telecom media Technology and Manufacturing business unit at service now and today what I wanted to do was talk about the TNI CI attributes table in TNI want to explain what that is and what it's used for so let's take a look at the TNI attributes table so it's got two primary uses the first is uh to separate non-network or it equipment from Network equipment in TNI so an example of that will be servers sometimes um servers are used in network inventory to support virtual Network functions so virtual routers virtual fir walls uh but servers are obviously uh related directly to it as well and so many times you will not want to co-mingle your it assets and CIS with your network assets as well so you need a way to be able to separate those and the TNI attributes table is how that is done so uh whenever we create uh a Ci or or a device uh in network inventory a record is added to the TNI C attributes table and a relationship is made to the cmdb CI table so that there is a reference to that CI and then uh TNI then recog recognizes that CI and gives you access to it in the application the second use of the tnci attributes table is to provide a uh a list of common attributes across multiple uh cmdb classes so when we first started with TNI we had only one class and we called that Telco equipment uh but we have since added over 80 new classes and we continue to to add classes to the cmdb for different equipment types and Technologies so as we add those classes we also intended to create this tnci attributes table as a common place for attributes that are uh shared amongst those different classes so some examples of those attributes will be operation notes the type the role the function of that CI um access identifier which is an alias name for your network interfaces as well as things like whether that CI is replaceable or if it's a spare so let's go into TNI and see what this all looks like so following up on our example of servers I'm going to go create a new server and you can see that whenever I'm presented a form uh to create a new CI uh for TNI I will also see a set inventory attributes uh UI action button when you add the information to the form and you want to commit that to the database and you click that set inventory attributes button that creates that linkage between the TNI entity table and the cmdb C table and it also gives you access to all of those attributes so that you can pop at those attributes as they relate to the CI that you've created so what I want to do here is just create a test server I'm not going to add this to the TNI CI attributes table not yet but I will so we'll go down here to the manufacturer we'll make this a hulet Packard server hpx operating system I'm not going to fill out all of these things um but I could if wanted to um but in this case I'm not going to click this button I'm just going to click save so I've created a record in the cmdb I've created a CI in the uh server table but when I go into TNI you'll see that it's not visible to me here but if we go to our servers we will see that that server is indeed there so if I open up that record you'll see that I actually I actually have access to that set inventory attributes button from here as well so let's go ahead and click that button you'll see that I've now presented with a form that allows me to fill out any additional information about the CI I'm not really going to fill much out here I'm just going to say that the network domain is a core we'll assign this to network site site 01 and then we can update that so you'll see now that I have an entry in this column for TN attributes and if we go back to network inventory workspace and we refresh our server list you'll see that that server is now visible in TNI and can be managed and related to your network inventory so that's how the TNI CI attributes table works and what it's intended for I hope this helps if you have any questions please post them on the community website and I'll be happy to answer those thank you very much