CI Lifecycle Management

[Bipinkumarsingh]

We have CMDB with discovery enabled, it is creating the record in CMDB when it is discovered with status as Installed. We have enabled the Life cycle mapping to map the CI Life cycle stage and life cycle stage status. I want to know if I need to manually manage the CI's operational state what is the best practice to mark a CI's operation state as "Retired" and that will update the Life cycle stage and life cycle stage status automatically. Or if there is any better way to handle this ?

[Tony Branton]

If you have well-understood criteria for identifying CIs that should be retired, you can use CMDB Data Manager  to create retirement policies.   When executed, retirement policies will set whichever fields have been defined for retirement with the appropriate value for CIs meeting the data filter criteria set in the policy.  These policies  are scheduled to run daily and will perform actions on CIs as they meet the filter criteria, so they're dynamic.

You can also use Data Manager to archive or delete retired CIs to maintain a lean CMDB.

For Retire, Archive and Delete policies, you can optionally have tasks require approval before CIs are retired, archived or deleted.  OOB subflows govern the approval process - these can be copied and modified to suit unique approval processes.  

OOB, Data Manager includes a Retirement Definition for the cmdb_ci class that uses the CSDM life cycle fields.   You can change this to use other fields (e.g. operational_status).  A Retirement Definition for a specific CI class can be inherited by derived (i.e. child CI classes).  If the Retirement Definition for the cmdb_ci class is the only active Retirement Definition, then it will be applied to all derived CI classes.

Hope this helps with managing the retirement of your CI records.