Purpose:
To effectively manage billing and account lifecycles for cloud accounts within your enterprise, it's crucial to establish the appropriate context for each account. This context helps determine factors like ownership (business unit), cost allocation (cost center), and associated applications.
ServiceNow provides a set of platform tables that can serve as a valuable source of information for creating new subscription accounts with the necessary context. These tables include:
- Sys Choice (sys_choice): Contains translated text for options that appear in choice lists.
- Cost Center (cmn_cost_center): Contains translated text for options that appear in choice lists. For new installations of Cloud Account Management, you must populate this table manually.
- Business Unit (business_unit): Contains information on the business units within your organization, including functions like Finance, HR, or IT. For new installations of Cloud Account Management, you must populate this table manually.
- Department (cmn_department): Contains the names of the departments in your organization. For new installations of Cloud Account Management, you must populate this table manually.
- System User (sys_user): This table contains user information for the ServiceNow instance. For new installations of Cloud Account Management, you must populate this table manually.
These tables are widely used by CAM and other ServiceNow products. This shared data source promotes a "single source of truth" for information, ensuring consistency across applications. It also facilitates seamless cross-application integration within the ServiceNow platform.
1. Sys Choice (sys_choice):
The Sys Choice table stores various pre-defined options used for categorization across different ServiceNow applications. An existing element named "environment" might already be used in many CMDB CI tables for this purpose. If an "environment" element already exists in your CMDB CI tables, it's recommended to continue using that for consistency. If there's no existing "environment" element, you'll need to create appropriate data choices within the Sys Choice table to categorize cloud accounts based on their environment (e.g., production, development, testing).
Procedure:
- From the ServiceNow navigation bar on the left, access the "sys_choice" table.
- Within the "sys_choice" table, apply a filter using the term "environment" in the appropriate search field. This will display any existing choices related to "environment".
- If you find relevant choices for "environment" already defined, you can proceed without further modifications.
- If no existing "environment" choices are found, follow these steps to create them:
-
- Table Reference: Enter "cmdb_ci" in the "Table" field.
- Element: Enter "environment" (case-sensitive) in the "Element" field.
- Label/Value: Provide a descriptive label for the environment (e.g., "Production", "Development", "Testing") in the "Label" field. This label will be displayed to users. In the "Value" field, enter the corresponding technical identifier for the environment (ensure it matches the label).
Repeat for Each Environment: Repeat steps 4a-4c to create additional choices for each of your cloud account environments.
2. Cost Center (cmn_cost_center):
- This table holds information about cost centers used for financial tracking.
- Ensure this table is populated to refer it in CAM Subscription Account request process
3. Business Unit (business_unit):
- This table defines the various business units within your organization.
- Ensure this table is populated to refer to it in the CAM Subscription Account Request process.
4. Department (cmn_department):
- This table manages departmental structures within your organization.
- Ensure this table is populated to refer to it in the CAM Subscription Account Request process.
5. System User (sys_user):
- The
sys_usertable within ServiceNow stores user information for the entire instance. This user information plays a crucial role in various Cloud Account Management (CAM) operations. - By default, the CAM application is restricted to prevent general user access. To grant access to the CAM application, users must be assigned specific security groups that provide the necessary CAM permissions.
Required Role to perform this step:
ServiceNow Administrator
Output of this setup:
To proceed with the next steps, ensure the following tables are populated with the necessary data:
- Sys Choice (sys_choice)
- Cost Center (cmn_cost_center)
- Business Unit (business_unit)
- Department (cmn_department)
- System User (sys_user)
Back to main KB - Cloud Account Management (CAM) - Setup (KB1641505)
