Importing Hardware Assets into ServiceNow
In this article, I’m going to show you how to import hardware assets into ServiceNow.
In this article you’ll learn:
How to prepare an excel spreadsheet for importing hardware assets
How to create an import set and transform map in ServiceNow
So maybe you’re just implementing hardware asset management in ServiceNow, or you have a spreadsheet of assets that you’ve got from another system or tool, and you’d like to load them into the system. Importing hardware assets into ServiceNow is a fairly simple process, and can be done in a matter of minutes.
In today’s blog post, I’m going to show you how to import 10 Apple MacBook Pro laptops into the system, and walk you through the process step by step.
For the first step, I’ve gone ahead and populated an excel spreadsheet with the Apple MacBook Pro’s that we’re going to be importing into the system. As you can see below, I’ve populated the model category, model, asset tag, serial number, location, assigned to, state, and cost columns with values.
One good thing to know is when you’re importing values into a reference field, the column values in the spreadsheet need to contain the same values that exist in the system, or they won’t get populated and an error will be shown. In this spreadsheet for example, you can see that the model category, model, location, and assigned to columns all relate to reference fields in the system, so all of these columns need to contain values that exactly match those already in the system.
For example, the model category “Computer” already exists in the system, so when we perform this import, it’ll match against this value, and populate the model category field on the hardware asset form.
You’ll also notice that I haven’t included all of the hardware asset fields in this spreadsheet. For demo purposes I’ve just included the most common fields.
Now to begin importing these hardware assets, open up ServiceNow, and in the navigation filter, type in “Load data”.
Click on the “Load Data” module located underneath the “System Import Sets” application.
You’ll now be navigated to this “Load Data” UI page.
For the first step of the import, we have to create something called an import set table. To do this, we’re going to keep the “Create table” option selected, since this is the first time we’re importing hardware asset records, and in the “Label” field, I’m going to enter “Hardware Asset Import”.
For the source of the import, I’m going to select “File”, and then click on the choose file button and select the spreadsheet we previously reviewed.
And for the sheet number and header row fields, I’m going to keep them both as one, since the sheet number is one, and the header is located on row one within my excel spreadsheet.
Now click on the “Submit” button.
You’ll now be presented with this progress page that shows that the import is complete and was successful.
Now to load this data into the hardware asset table, we need to create a transform map to transform the data.
To do this, click on the “Create transform map” hyperlink.
You’ll now be navigated to this blank transform map form.
In the first field “Name”, I’m going to enter “Hardware Asset Import”, and for the “Target table” field, I’m going to select the alm_hardware table since that’s the table for hardware assets.
Now right click on the form header, and click “Save”.
Now that we’ve created the transform map, the next step is to create our field mapping that maps the columns from our excel spreadsheet to the fields in the hardware asset table. To do this, we need to click on the “Mapping Assist” hyperlink located underneath the related links section of the form.
You’ll now be taken to this mapping assist UI page where you can select fields from the import set on the left, and match them to fields within the hardware asset table on the right.
I’m going to select: model category, model, asset tag, serial number, location, assigned to, state, and cost, and match these fields to their corresponding fields in the hardware asset table.
Now that we’ve matched all of the fields, click on the “Save” button.
Click on the “Transform” related link to begin transforming the data from the import set to the hardware asset table.
From this slushbucket page, ensure that the correct transform map is selected in the box on the right handside.
Now click on the “Transform” button.
The system will begin processing the transform, and you’ll be navigated to this progress page, where you can see that the transform was successful.
Now if we head over to the hardware assets module, you can see that the 10 computers we just imported are now available in the system.
And it’s as easy as that, importing hardware assets into ServiceNow via an excel spreadsheet is a fairly simple task, and can be achieved in a matter of minutes.
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