The Resource System
Resource System Components
Resources
In ProVision, a “Resource” is simply an umbrella term for the components that you are tracking.
Resources may be:
- Physical assets such as servers and routers
- Virtual assets such as DNS Zones or VMs
- Individual people or companies (customers)
- Places holding your assets, such as datacenters
Section
The generic type of a resource is called a Section. General terms such as rack, routers, customer, servers, and datacenters would be considered "Sections" in ProVision.
Example: You might have an individual server named "Test Server", but its generic type of resource is that of a “Server” – so we would associate “Test Server” with the Section “Server”.
Think of Sections as templates for your resources. When a Section is created, you can associate specific fields and gadgets with that Section. In the case of our "Server" section, we would want to associate fields that are common server properties, such as make, model, operating system, and domain. Then, anytime we looked up a specific server in ProVision, we can see and update the make, model, OS, and domain information.
Entry
Think of an Entry as the individual item you are tracking – it has a specific name, it might have an IP Address, a physical address, or additional descriptive data that is associated with it.
Our "Test Server" resource is an Entry under the "Server" Section.
Here, we can see that under the “Datacenter” section, we have two entries – one is the Ashburn datacenter, the other is the Boston datacenter. Under “Servers”, we have entries for “Test Server” and “Backup Server”.
Category
Another part of ProVision’s resource system is “Categories”. Categories allow you to group resources together under a name of your choosing to further organize your resources. A category that is often used is “Customer”, grouping customer resources together.
In this example, we are grouping racks, servers, and routers under the “My Custom Grouping” category.
Creating categories is entirely optional, so you can decide internally if the additional organization is needed in your instance.
Resource Hierarchy
In ProVision, "Child" Resources can be created underneath a "Parent" resource. This functionality allows for hierarchies to be created to match the desired organizational structure. An example of this would be to create racks and servers as children under a datacenter entry. Chart View, available from the Resources tab, lets you see this structure graphically.
The structure decided upon will influence how resources are set up in ProVision, as well as behaviors of functions while working with items such as IP Blocks or DNS zones.