Best practices related to hostname reuse in CMDB

Allen_Deepak · ‎02-26-2024

Hello All,

We have a scenario, where the asset is retired and related CI with hostname 'abcd123' is also Retired. Now the deskside wants to reuse the hostname 'abcd123' to different asset. By doing this, i'm worried we will have an duplicate record in CMDB with similiar hostnames. Though they are not real duplicates, by doing this operation repeatedly, we would end up with multiple duplicates which causes data quality issues. We need to retain the old CI as well for audit purposes.

should we stop this approach of hostname reuse?

Please elt me know your thoughts.

CMDB Whisperer · ‎02-26-2024

You certainly can allow for the reuse of host names in the CMDB. Simply add an identification inclusion rule which excludes Retired CIs. This will cause the old CI to be retained and the new CI to be uniquely identified. While this is not a recommendation that you should allow for reuse, for practical purposes you should put this rule in place if there is a chance of host names being reused. Separately you can and maybe should discourage reuse of host names, but enforcing that as a policy with your compute teams is definitely more involved than the work needed to account for it in the CMDB.

The opinions expressed here are the opinions of the author, and are not endorsed by ServiceNow or any other employer, company, or entity.

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Mark Manders · ‎02-26-2024

It really depends on what you are using the old data for. If, for instance, you have 25 incidents with ci abcd123 in a list, how do you know which ones were the old one and which ones were the new (of course in related lists it will be taken care of by the sysID, but still). What's the reason for re-using the names?
If you are doing anything related to the names, that could cause confusion, make it that they at least need to be uniquely identifiable like 'abdc123-a', etc. It will help in recognizing.

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Dr Atul G- LNG · ‎02-26-2024

Hi @Allen_Deepak

Reusing the same name is not a good practice. Better to use new name for fresh host name, also avoid using _old or _new.

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Sohail Khilji · ‎02-26-2024

Hi @Allen_Deepak,

Its always safe to use unique name to identify any assets. (Even though we have a Serial Number and asset Tags associated to identify them uniquely). See if there is any strong reason to reuse the retried duplicate name to the asset. try to see the impacts on all other modules were ever the asset name is associate. This must help you decide to go a head or not... i hope this helps..

Short answer : Not recommended....

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Ashok Sasidhara · ‎02-26-2024

We should totally avoid reusing old hostnames. This is because the retired CIs should be only marked as Retired and never be deleted. CIs should be archived and later deleted only after the completion of archival and retention periods (these should be pre-defined during process definition). Only after old CI is completely deleted, it should not be a problem to reuse the same hostname.