Best practices related to hostname reuse in CMDB

[Allen_Deepak]

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 · Accepted solution]

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.

[Jeff WelchBAE]

Would this approach also be used for reused assets - i.e. same serial with "oldname" retired, but redeployed with "new name" which is causing a duplication task to be created?

[CMDB Whisperer]

Yes, that is correct.  Though it should also be noted that out of box the CI and the Asset are indelibly paired and linked, so even though this will not create a duplicate CI, arguably it will result in two asset records with the same asset tag, one of which is retired and the other which is in use.  While the CMDB owner might not find that to be a problem, the Asset Manager might disagree!  Out of box there is no way to have a true view of an asset that has reused and redeployed as separate CI records.  ServiceNow's asset and CI business logic and data model does not support this.

[Allen_Deepak]

Thank you all for the suggestions. This is indeed helpful.