Relating Applications and Vendors in the CMDB

Question

Is there a way to relate a Vendor to an Application in the CMDB?  We created a vendor CI but when you are on an application record and try to attach a related object your only options are incidents, problems, changes, releases and POs.  We would like to have a way to see all of the applications a vendor supports and if you are having an issue with an application and need to contact support a quick way to link out to the vendor CI to locate contact information.

smiller08 · Answer

I am curious if there has been any progress in allowing Vendor to be a related item in the CMDB.  I know there have been changes in fields and dynamic fields are now an option but I still do not see a way to related vendors to application or other CIs.

joeybrown · Answer

To add onto what Sean already pointed out, we have plans to fix this by merging all objects (users, computers, software, vendors, etc) into the CMDB so you can relate all items to each other. It's a process that is going to take some time so I also recommend Sean's approach of creating the Vendor as a CI directly in the CMDB. This will also give you the ability to add custom fields for collecting all the information needed about the vendor.

smiller08 · Answer

Thanks - I may submit it as a Feature Request.  We started down the path of a custom CI but then you need to recreate the vendor for each app they support.  If we own 5 Solarwinds Apps I would want a single vendor record attached to each app and then on the Vendor record you would see the 5 related apps.  For now we created a Vendor field on our application CI form and we copy the URL to the vendor CI record into that field.  Clunky but it works for now.