Best practices for CI retirement/archival rules?

yogesh15dd · ‎03-15-2024

Hi Team,

What are some of the best practices for Configuration Item (CI) retirement/archival rules?

@ doug_schulze

kindly suggest.

Thanks

Yogesh Datta

AJ-TechTrek · ‎03-15-2024

Hi @yogesh15dd ,

CMDB Data Manager introduced in the Rome release, provides a way of targeting CIs for retirement, archive and deletion using a policy-based approach.

CMDB Data Manager works with batches of 1000 CIs which is set using the system property glide.cmdb.data.manager.delete.batch.size. While it's possible to adjust this, it can impact platform performance if increased to higher values.

Policies for retiring/archiving/deleting CIs are evaluated on a daily basis making them dynamic - the target CI list is updated based on what's in the CMDB when the scheduled job for a policy runs. In your case you'd define two policies in CMDB Data Manager:

Retire policy: sets the Lifecycle Stage field to "End of Life" for the Network Adapter CIs
Archive policy: archives the Network Adapter CIs whose Lifecycle Stage field is "End of Life"

Assets and CIs should never be deleted directly after retirement. Check whether the company has any existing data retention and archival policy. If there is no existing policy, check whether they need it at this point. If they are in the initial stages of ServiceNow implementation with less amount of data populated, it may not be needed soon (as it becomes important only when the volume of data becomes huge). But it is still a good idea to define the policy during the initial CMDB & asset process definition itself. For example, archiving CI data after 2 years and then deleting from the archive after 5 years or 7 years is often a standard practice.

But even while defining an archival and retention policy, it is better to define it only for CI classes which do not have an asset associated with it. That way asset data will be always retained in the system. Asset data might be required in future also for purposes like audit, compliance, sustainability reporting etc (This point is valid for some CI classes also and that is why deleting should be never done soon after retirement).

Only when the asset data itself gets huge, archival and retention needs to be considered for those. In that case, it would be better to define a longer retention time period before archival and deletion (compared to CI classes which do not have assets associated with it)

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MoeG82 · ‎02-18-2025

I have set up remediation rules under data manager and still I have over 44k stale CIs. only about 3k may have been removed.

Vladimir Yordan · ‎08-21-2024

Thank you for your insight Ajay!
We face a similar case in our account, where the CI tables need to have a policy set for archiving and destruction, but the Assets associated with them need to remain in the archived table , but never to be deleted.

In other words, find a way to NOT delete any assets, but only CIs.

Has anyone faced such a problem and solved it?

Alexander Versh · ‎10-29-2024

Hello @AJ-TechTrek can you tell the correlation between this property glide.cmdb.data_manager.default_archive_time

and individual archiving policies and deletion policies? How and when that property is evaluated or used in combination with those two types of policies?