Configuration Items - Anzen Docs

What are Configuration Items?

Configuration items (CIs) are the core records in your asset inventory. A CI represents any infrastructure asset your organisation manages - servers, network switches, firewalls, routers, cloud instances, storage arrays, or any other device or resource.

Key Information

Each configuration item captures the following details:

Name - a human-readable name for the asset (required).
Owning entity - the entity (department, team, or office) this asset belongs to (required).
Device type - an optional vendor and model classification.
Hostname - DNS hostname or fully qualified domain name.
Operating system - OS name and version.
Network interfaces - one or more interfaces (physical or virtual), each carrying its own IP and MAC address. See the Network Interfaces section below.
Open ports - a list of discovered open ports, including port number, detected service, and banner information (populated by the network scanner).
Scanner source - identifies which scanner last updated this asset.
Description - free-text notes about the asset.

Manual and Scanner-Created Assets

Configuration items can be created in two ways:

Manual - create an asset through the management interface, filling in the details yourself.
Network scanner - Anzen's built-in scanner discovers devices on your network and automatically creates or updates assets. Scanner-created assets are tagged with the scan run that found them.

Network Interfaces

A configuration item can carry any number of network interfaces - virtual or physical. Each row represents one address reachable on one interface, so a cloud VM with a private and a public IP on the same NIC shows as two rows that share a name. Each row carries:

Name - the OS-side interface name (eth0, ens5, lo, ...). Multiple rows may share a name when an interface carries more than one address.
Kind - physical, virtual, loopback, vpn, or other. Cloud-discovered ENIs and NICs are virtual.
IP address - the address reachable on this row. IPv4 and IPv6 on the same NIC are separate rows.
MAC address - hardware address where applicable.
Description - a human-readable label. Cloud Connectors set sensible defaults (e.g. Primary network interface - subnet-0abc, Public IP (Elastic IP eipalloc-9) on eth0); manual rows can be free-form. Customer-set descriptions on the cloud side (the AWS ENI Description, for example) win over the synthesized default.
Primary - one row per CI is flagged primary. The CI's top-level IP / hostname / MAC fields mirror this row, so existing API consumers and report views keep working.

When you create a CI through the API or the network scanner, any IP or MAC you submit is automatically promoted into a primary interface row - so the interfaces table is the single source of truth on the detail page. From the management UI, IP and MAC addresses are added and edited directly in this table; the create form only asks for hostname and OS.

Open Ports

The open ports list is populated by the network scanner. Each entry contains a port number, the detected service name, and any banner information returned by the service. This data helps identify running services and potential security exposures without leaving Anzen.

Connections to Other Areas

Configuration items are connected to many parts of the platform:

Entity - every asset belongs to exactly one entity.
Device type - optional link to a vendor and model for classification.
Applications - assets can be linked to applications, showing which apps run on which infrastructure.
Business processes - assets can be linked to business processes, mapping infrastructure to workflows.
Tickets - incidents, problems, and changes can reference affected assets.
Controls - security controls can be linked to the assets they protect.

Archiving and Restoration

When you delete a configuration item, it is archived rather than permanently removed. This preserves historical references from tickets, controls, and audit logs. Archived assets can be restored at any time.

Adding CIs in Bulk

For large fleets, the cleanest path is the built-in network scanner: point it at a subnet and Anzen will create or update CIs automatically based on what it finds, tagging each with the scan run that produced it. For one-off bulk loads from a spreadsheet or another CMDB, use the API directly - POST /api/configuration-items accepts the same fields as the create form, so a short script can ingest hundreds of CIs in one run. There is no spreadsheet upload UI today; the scanner and the API cover the realistic ingest patterns.