Best practice for Managing powered off Servers in servieNow

[sridivya728]

We have several powered-off servers in our environment and would like your guidance on how these should be updated in ServiceNow.

Could you please advise whether the Operational Status should be updated to Non-Operational and the Installed Status to Absent, or if there is another recommended approach for handling powered-off servers?

some of these servers are on legal hold, while others are planned for retirement in the coming months. Please let us know the appropriate status updates for these scenarios as well.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

No, mate, I don’t think this is the best way to do it. The operation status should be set to Non-Operational, and the incident state should be In Progress/Active as needed. Keeping it in Absent status is fine in this case.

[Sam Webb]

The answer to this depends on whether you are using Life Cycle Stage / Status, or not.

If you are... then your legal hold servers will likely benefit from "End of Operation > On Hold". If they are planned for retirement, then perhaps "End of Life > Pending Disposal".

To enable Life Cycle Stage & Status, your organisation will need to follow the guidance here:

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/servicenow-platform/common-service-data-model-csdm/cmdb-asset-CI-I...

And of course, no CMDB is complete without ensuring that the appropriate Service Requests / Process wrappers are in place to make sure that the people turning on/off, racking or disposing of these Servers are the ones updating the CMDB!

If you are not yet leveraging Life Cycle Stage, I'd recommend that you do that rather than customising install status / operational status, as when you come to implement Life Cycle you'll need to undo it (the customisation) all anyway!

Thanks,

Sam