Overview of entities in ITSI

In ITSI, an entity is an IT component that requires management to deliver an IT service. Each entity has specific attributes and relationships to other IT processes that uniquely identify it. Entities are usually hosts, but can also be items as diverse as network devices, applications, users, and cell towers.

ITSI entities can be any of the following components:

• Physical or virtual hosts
• Network devices (switches, routers)
• Users (AD/LDAP)
• Storage systems, volumes
• Operating system processes
• Software application (db, web server, business app)
• Application process instances (for example, 2 instances of the same web server application is 2 separate entities)
• Cell towers

Entities contain information that ITSI uses to associate services with information found in Splunk searches. You can use this entity information to filter items according to the entity definition.

An entity is similar to a "configuration item" in the ITIL framework, but an entity is never a service itself.

Define entities before creating services. When you configure a service, you can specify entity matching rules based on entity aliases that automatically add the entities to your service. For more information, see Configure services in ITSI in this manual.

How to define entities

There are four ways to create entities in ITSI:

• Define a single entity
• Auto-detect entities using ITSI modules
• Import entities from a CSV file
• Import entities from searches

All entities exist in the Global team. Only a user with write permissions to the Global team can create a single entity. Only a user with the itoa_admin role can import entities from CSV files or searches.