Summary
This article covers how to use the Asset model to track sub-entities of a Company (e.g. departments, locations, or product environments). We’ll also review how to structure key fields, capture usage metrics, and apply Global Filters to monitor performance at a more granular level.
Who is this article for?
Planhat builders/admins who configure their tenant for their team (e.g. CS Ops).
This article is part of the Data Models Course.
Article Contents
Introduction
Assets have a many to one relationship to the Company and can receive time-series data and display Calculated Metrics. They do not have a time component (Start / End date) like Projects.
Assets are generally used to represent sub-entities of a Company, for example Departments, Shops or Locations, Data Clusters, Products, Product Environments or any other trackable component of a customer.
Key System Fields
First, we have basic Asset Fields such as:
Name - stores the name of the Asset.
External ID - typically this will be an ID that you have in your own system, which makes it easy to map the Asset from your own system to Planhat.
Source ID - the unique identifier for Assets synced with an external CRM system (e.g. Salesforce and HubSpot). This field ensures your Assets in Planhat sync with the correct assets in your external CRM system.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields will be dependent upon the reason that you are using Assets, so it will vary from org to org.
If you were using Assets for your Products, you would create Custom Fields that have specifics related to each individual Product.
For a SaaS company with several product lines (let’s pretend one is Cloud Storage), examples of Custom Fields might include:
Amount of storage used (GB/TB)
Storage limit (GB/TB)
% of storage used
Type of file
Total # of each file type
File size
Product Health
Site Status
Field Groups
Now that you have an understanding of the Key Fields, let’s look at how to group them in a logical way. This will display those fields in Previews (as well as full page profiles) for Assets. We recommend a set up as below, where there are at least the "Overview' and "Metrics" field groupings.
For more information on Field Groups, take a look at Help Center Article: Field Groups.
Create Form
To ensure your data stays clean, it’s important you make fields mandatory for creation. We recommend the following at a minimum to enable you to manage your Assets in the best way. Note that the Create Form fields will depend on the use case for which you're using Assets.
Common Global Filters
If we were to use the SaaS company example from above, common Global Filters could include specifics within each product line.
For example, that org could create Global Filters relating to their Cloud Storage product:
Tiers or Percentages for storage used (list field) -e.g. 0-25%, 26-50%, 51-75%, 75-90%, 91-100
File type (list) - e.g. Word doc, Excel file, PowerPoint, Image, etc.
Status (list) - e.g. Planned, Live, etc.
In the example below, we've created a Data Table Page wherein we're getting insight into all planned deployments across all product lines.
Useful Metrics
Again, using the SaaS Cloud Storage example, some common Metrics could include:
New files added over the last day / week / month
Total files over the last day / week / month
Trending average file size over days / weeks / month
Trending % of storage used over days / weeks / month
Trending # of file types stored over days / weeks / month
For additional information on working with Assets, check out this Help Center Article.