5 Steps to Monitor CMDB Health Proactively

[Mary Vanatta1]

Industry-specific data must meet an organization's capabilities for a business to succeed. Banking and healthcare industries, for example, must have accurate monetary, customer, and patient information. Business success is at risk if this data is not maintained and there is no governance structure around how it gets populated, utilized, and secured. Customers become unhappy when their data is lost or services you provide are experiencing outages. The CMDB contains operational data critical to providing services, driving an organization's outcomes, meeting its capabilities, and transforming them digitally.

The last article, "CMDB – 3 Pillars to Successful Data Foundations," discusses one of the pillars, "Governance and Health," and how setting up a governance committee is critical to success. Data governance occurs outside of the platform. However, you may proactively track the quality and accuracy of the CMDB data with tools built in and for the ServiceNow platform.

Here are the 5 steps you should take to monitor the health of your CMDB:

1. Create a governance committee – to document and maintain a configuration management plan and to hold governance meetings. The configuration policies and plan should include a RACI chart, defined processes, and reports for regular analysis and review of CMDB Health data in ongoing governance meetings. With executive sponsorship, communicate processes and crowdsource the effort. Read on to the next steps to automate and receive CMDB Health data.
2. Download the CMDB and CSDM Data Foundation dashboards from the Store. The dashboards contain 35+ health scan definitions.
   • Provide users with the correct roles; [asset], [itil_admin], or the [admin] role (give the admin role to developers and certified administrators.)
   • Assure the following daily scheduled jobs are running. 
   • CMDB Get Well Metric Collection and CMDB Data foundations PA Metric Collection
   • Review regularly the four tabs for these areas of focus.
     •  Best Practice – checks the usage of tables and properties
     •  Customizations – checks on the customizations that may affect the adoption
     •  Data management practices – checks third-party data sources
     •  ITSM practices – checks to see if ITSM processes leverage CMDB data
     • Review and remediate as needed based on the results. The remediation playbooks are linked to articles in Now Support. Each playbook has 3 plays; an Analysis Play, Fix Play, and Data Governance Play that provides:
       • Executive Summary – why is this health scan definition important
       • Upstream causes – ideas as to why this might be happening
       • Downstream consequences – what happens if it is not fixed?
       • Remediation steps to resolve the low indicator score

3. Configure the CMDB Health Dashboard. This dashboard consists of four KPIs:
   • Completeness - checks to see if recommended and required fields are populated.  
   • Correctness - checks for duplicate, orphan, and stale configuration items (CIs)
   • Compliance – compares actual values of specified fields against expected values. For example, do all servers have at least 4 MB of ram?
   • Relationship Health – tracks duplicate, orphan, and stale relationships.

Take these next steps to configure CMDB Health Dashboard:

3. • Start the scheduled health metric jobs – A tab lists the scheduled jobs. Set these to active. The jobs run daily. The jobs can be scheduled to run at a specific time and executed manually.
   • Configure Health Inclusion Rules in the CI Class Manager. Health inclusion rules have no rules out of the box, and all CIs are shown on the dashboard. Ensure you look at principal CIs like servers by OS, network gear, printers, personal computers, and databases. Child classes inherit these rules.
   • Configure Rules in the CI Class Manager
   • Completeness rules - Start with Recommended fields by adding minimal viable attributes. (e.g., Location, Manufacturer, Model ID, Name, Serial Number, and Support Group, Managed by Group, Owner, and Approval Group)
   • Compliance rules are standards system engineers set to ensure all servers have anti-virus protection or a base amount of ram. To pass the CMDB health audit, a CI must comply with all audits for that CI.
   • Correctness  - Set up the Orphan and Staleness rules. Duplicates are not set in the CI Class Manager. Duplication is determined by the population of CIs in the CMDB as they run through the IRE engine. Set attributes based on an attribute or a relationship for an orphan rule. For a relationship, the condition must not be met. An example rule may state that a Windows server must have a relationship. Stale rules may state that if a server is not updated in 15 days, it is stale, especially if it is populated by automated means.

4. Set up Data Manager Policies –  Use Data Manager to set up policies to bulk manage CI lifecycles such as deletion, archival, retirement, and attestation.
   • Provide access to Data Managers with the data manager admin and data manager user roles.
   • Set up policies for a lifecycle event, such as CI retirement, associated with a sub-flow that creates the tasks. Configure to require with or without approval.
   • Schedule daily jobs to run all published Data Manager policies.
     
5. Configure Data Certification – certify the integrity of the CMDB for regulatory and compliance reasons with the Data Certification application.
   • Activate the plugin and assign the CMDB admin role.
   • Set up the schedules – the person and team can define the data verification schedule. Schedules define what data is to be certified, how frequently, and instructions to the certifier.
   • Create tasks and assign them to users to ensure the data is correct and verified.
   • Track the tasks to completion.

In Summary, achieving a healthy CMDB requires governance, using the ServiceNow platform applications, and ongoing activities to maintain this important data repository.

Links and Resources:
CMDB Governance
CMDB Health Configuration
CMDB Data Manager
CMDB Data Certification
CMDB Workshop
Video – Data Foundations and CMDB Health Dashboard Review
Video - CMDB Best Practices
Product Documentation

[Mon22]

I have a question regarding the CMDB Health Dashboard Jobs, I have access to CMDB health dashboard and reports however I don't see any CMDB Health Dashboard Jobs when I clicked it. The Roles that I already have were Itil_admin and Asset.

I also checked the Scheduled Jobs under Health Preference. There's no Jobs displayed.