Managing relationships between devices (The Related Items tab)

Background

Devices do not exist in a vacuum. They are connected, attached to, installed on, and backed up by, other devices. When a ticket is created for a device, it is often not only the primary device that is impacted, but the whole interrelated web.

Knowing how the various components are interrelated will speed up your response to an emergency.

EXAMPLE  Guilderland Central School has a single Datto Siris 4X 48TB for the district that backs up the high school, middle school, and the 3 elementary schools (which are all sub-organizations to the GCSD parent organization). I want to add the devices it backs up as child or a related items, so that if I get a failed backup alert, I know which devices and schools are impacted.

To facilitate your operations in this reality, Autotask allows you to model devices as parent, children, or related items to the primary device associated with a ticket.

IMPORTANT  The related items don't have to be associated with the same organization. Devices from all active organizations are available on Related, Child, and Parent Device Data Selectors. Inactivating an organization will not break any existing relationships.

EXAMPLE  Your organization has a VOIP server that runs the softphone system for Albany Med, Troy Medical Imaging, and RPI Community Dental. You want to add those systems as a child or related items, so that when you run maintenance on this hardware, you know which organizations to alert.

Types of relationships

Technically, there is not much difference between parent, child and related items. Describing a device as a parent or child is simply a convention.

  • Parent device: The main or most important device. Each device can only have one parent.
  • Child device: A peripheral device. In the hierarchy below the parent device. Devices can have multiple children.

EXAMPLE  The workstation is the parent of a mouse, monitor and printer.

  • Related device: A device that has something in common with another device, but no hierarchical relationship is suggested. Devices can have multiple related items.

EXAMPLE  Other devices on the network that share the specs of the device. Any problems that appear on the device may also apply to the other devices.

How to...