CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards Introduction

Siyou Li · ‎07-29-2025

What are CMDB and CSDM Data Foundation Dashboards?

The CMDB and CSDM Data Foundation Dashboards are powerful ServiceNow features that provide visibility into the health and quality of your configuration data. These dashboards serve as comprehensive monitoring tools that help organizations maintain high-quality data in their Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Common Service Data Model (CSDM) implementations.

CMDB Data Foundation Dashboard

The CMDB Data Foundation Dashboard offers a centralized view of your CMDB health, enabling you to identify and address data quality issues proactively. This dashboard provides critical metrics and visualizations that help maintain the integrity of your configuration items (CIs) and their relationships.

Key Features:

Best Practices Monitoring:
- Tracks adherence to CMDB best practices
- Identifies hardware CIs missing serial numbers and monitors key class information
- Highlights services missing owners
Customization Tracking:
- Identifies custom business application tables
- Monitors unconventional custom tables
- Tracks custom CMDB relationship types
- Detects modifications to out-of-box relationship types
Data Management Practices:
- Monitors CIs not processed via Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE)
- Identifies unhandled duplicate CIs
- Highlights CIs missing names
- Tracks active CIs not updated within 90 days
- Identifies managed CIs missing model entries

Benefits:

Provides a holistic view of CMDB health
Helps maintain data quality and accuracy
Enables proactive identification of potential issues
Supports compliance with configuration management best practices
Improves decision-making with accurate configuration data

CSDM Data Foundation Dashboard

The CSDM Data Foundation Dashboard focuses on the health of your service data model implementation. It tracks relationships between business services, application services, and infrastructure objects to ensure proper service mapping and management.

Key Features:

Service Relationship Monitoring:
- Tracks business applications missing application services
- Identifies application services missing business applications
- Monitors business service offerings missing application services
- Highlights application services missing business service offerings
- Tracks technical services missing technical service offerings
Infrastructure-to-Service Mapping:
- Identifies infrastructure objects missing application services
- Monitors infrastructure objects missing business applications
- Tracks application services missing infrastructure objects
- Highlights business applications missing infrastructure objects
Health Scoring:
- Provides real-time health scores for CSDM implementation
- Offers weighted metrics to focus on critical areas
- Supports prioritization of remediation efforts

Benefits:

Ensures proper service mapping across your organization
Facilitates service-aware operations
Supports service portfolio management
Enables better impact analysis
Improves service delivery and customer satisfaction

How These Dashboards Work Together

Both dashboards work in tandem to provide a comprehensive view of your ServiceNow data quality. While the CMDB dashboard focuses on the health of your configuration items and their relationships, the CSDM dashboard concentrates on service mappings and relationships. Together, they help ensure that your ServiceNow instance has accurate, complete, and well-structured data to support IT operations, service management, and business decisions.

Getting Started

To leverage these dashboards effectively:

Regularly review the dashboard metrics to identify areas needing improvement
Prioritize issues based on impact using the provided scoring system
Follow the playbook links for remediation guidance
Track improvements over time to demonstrate the value of data quality initiatives
Share insights with stakeholders to gain support for data quality efforts

These dashboards are valuable tools for IT leaders, CMDB administrators, service owners, and anyone responsible for maintaining data quality in ServiceNow. By incorporating them into your regular workflows, you can ensure that your ServiceNow instance provides accurate, reliable data for informed decision-making.

Associated Components

CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards require running below jobs to get the metric results:

Scheduled Jobs: Calculates and stores details for compliant records associated with metrics, populating the list view of the metrics. Data appears on the dashboard only after the first run of this scheduled job.
- CMDB Get Well Metric Collection Job
- CSDM Get Well Metric Collection Job
PA (Performance Analytics) Jobs: Calculates the total non-compliant records associated with metrics and populates the PA widgets on the dashboard. Also, provides trending data over time for the non-compliant records associated with metrics
- CMDB Data Foundations PA Metric Collection Job
- CSDM Data Foundations PA Metric Collection Job

How to install CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards

CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard app is automatically entitled on all sub-prod instances, all ServiceNow instances and all ServiceNow developer portal instances. If you need to entitle on your instance, please go to ServiceNow store and download the latest CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards store app.

Roles Required

To access the CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard, users must be configured with the admin, itil_admin, or asset roles. Some metrics that let you drill-down to Performance Analytics (PA) data, might require additional roles for accessing specific tables. Those roles are specified as appropriate per metric

Additional Resources

Landing page

CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard product documentation

CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard product documentation

CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard common error scenarios

Next Step

CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard Architecture