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CMDB and CSDM Crawl stage - Populating Applications

ahbrook
Tera Contributor

yesterday

Hi everyone! 

 

I'm currently writing a proposal on how our institution can follow the crawl/walk/run/fly guidelines for the CSDMv5. Our instance is new, at a few months old. 

 

In the whitepaper, it recommends starting with Business Application, (Application) Service Instance, and Application. It also recommends that the Application table [cmdb_ci_appl] be populated/maintained automatically, specifically from Discovery.

 

At this time, we only have the core ServiceNow product (running Xanadu). We've also turned on the core SCCM Service Graph Connector and are getting data. Looking at the system, I can see that:

  • The "Software" CI class [cmdb_ci_spkg] has 41,125 items in it
  • The "Software Instance" table [cmdb_software_instance] has 717,219 rows in it
  • There is not a "Software Installation" table because we do not own SAM
  • There does not appear to be any defined reconciliation or data refresh rules, only out of the box identification rules.  

Is populating the application table something that people typically do with just the SCCM service graph connector, or is that something we should be looking at another source for? We also have JAMF,  Microsoft Defender (cloud/office 365 based), and Solarwinds Orion Server and Application Manager (though not on the workstations). 

 

Should we even worry about getting the Application information, especially if I am planning on populating the Application Service Instances and Business Applications manually? 

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danesh
Tera Expert

2 hours ago

SCCM alone cannot populate the Application Table effectively.

SCCM provides:

  • Software packages (cmdb_ci_spkg)
  • Software instances (cmdb_software_instance)
  • Device relationships

But it does not understand business context or service mapping. It lacks:

  • Application-to-service relationships
  • Business ownership
  • Logical grouping of software into applications

JAMF, Defender, Solarwinds will not automatically populate cmdb_ci_appl in a meaningful way without additional logic or integration.

 

To align with CSDMv5 guidelines and your current tooling, the following manual steps you can follow during the Crawl phase:

 

  • Define top Business Applications manually
  • Create Application Service Instances manually
  • Populate Application table manually (based on SCCM/JAMF/Orion insights)
  • Establish ownership and basic relationships