Best practice around managing Retired CIs in CMDB

[Allen_Deepak]

Hi All,

I have a question on managing Retired CIs in CMDB.  should we delete these retired CI records after certain timeframe or should we retain for audit & history purposes forever.

Please advise on the best practice around this.

Thanks,

shilpa

[CMDB Whisperer]

Short answer: yes, to both.

Most companies have explicit data retention policies that govern their operation.  You may need to hunt this down and you may need to seek consultation to determine how those policies apply to your configuration data.  When considering this, you should also consider the question of what records may need to be retained which refer to configuration items, such as Change Requests.  If you delete the CI then this will impact the data that is in the Change Request, and thus may impede compliance with data retention policies for services that are impacted by those changes.  

Once a CI is retired (or the Application Service that depended on it is retired), this typically starts the retention schedule.  For example, if your data retention policies state that you must retain records for 3 years, then that 3 years likely begins when the CI is retired.  After the data retention period has expired, then you can delete the CI.  In the meantime, if you wish to retain the data without cluttering up the system, you may be able to archive the CI as an interim step.  However, before doing so, you should understand that the archival data will still break the link to any references, so your specific policies will dictate whether CI archival is can be done in compliance with those policies.  

To manage the process of archiving and deleting CIs from your CMDB you should use CMDB Data Manager to create and execute policies that are in compliance with your data retention policies.

[Moe9]

I have a question related to this... Should "retired" CIs be selectable in change requests?

The use case that I was presented with was; if a server was retired, but then had to be "re-purposed", then how would you be able to select it - if retired CIs are filtered out of the CI field on a change request?

My understanding is that once a CI is retired, it shouldn't be selectable for changes, incidents, etc. Am I wrong to assume this, or is there a better process to manage this use case?

Please advise. Thank you.