CMDB Cleanup - Questions to ask the client

[Anish Reghu]

Dear experts,

I have the following set of questions which I have prepared to interview the customer and understand the (client to be) instance which requires a CMDB cleanup. Can you please suggest more or add/remove any more questions that you feel are important to help understand the environment better?

Is there any logic currently in place that validates duplicate CIs?

Is there a dedicated team who populates the CMDB?

Are the CIs being uploaded via excel import? If yes - how frequently is a CI dump extracted and what is the source?

Is there a backup of the CI data maintained somewhere?

What governs the CI relationships currently?

How are configuration items and business services classified in the as-is scenario?

Which processes are dependent on the current CMDB?

How many CIs have been populated until date in the CMDB?

Is there a mechanism to report a missing CI in case an incident is reported on a CI not found in the CMDB?

How are updates to CI record kept track of currently?

Are there CI owners designated for the CIs?

Does the current change management process interact with CMDB to reflect a change that impacts the CI?

How often is a report generated on the CIs, what type of reports are they?

Are the reports limited to a certain class of CIs?

What are the present day validations to ensure accurate CI information on a CI record?

Is there a specific role user modifying the CMDB or is it done by 'admin' users?

What drives the lifecycle of a CI in the current scenario?

Which CI tables have customized attributes? Justifications?

What validation does drive the placing of attributes at the right level in the CI classes?

Do you have the Discovery subscription? If yes, is it in use?

Where is the managed infrastructure information being maintained?

How do manage your datacenter and branch Infrastructure device as well as end user devices. Where do you store this details ? What is the process for commission and decommission of these devices. ?

Which team manages the CMDB, HAM and SAM?

Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with CIs that are to be cleaned up but have references to it in the existing processes? Do you make use of the CMDB health dashboards to track the overall health of the CMDB? If yes, what are the parameters being tracked?

Do you have custom relationships configured on the system as well, in addition to the customizations on the CI record?

Custom CMDB classes must begin with "u_", is that practice altered in any of the custom CMDB classes?

Are all applications as CIs having a Business owner assigned to it?

Note - I have already referred to the NowCreate (however the above qns are not from NowCreate) and didn't find my answers which is why I am on the community seeking. Thanks for understanding.

Regards,

Anish

[Mark Manders]

You are saying it's a client, so I assume you already have access to the instance? 

I would start there, because it will already answer a lot of questions you have. Check on the health dashboards (to see if they are using them) and if not: ask them why not.

If you sit down with your client and you can tell them (as example) that 34% of their CI's don't have a business owner, it shows you already did some work. 

They will have to tell you your expectations, but asking things you should already know if you looked into the instance don't make a good first impression. And you don't need to do an analysis, but if you can limit your questions and make them statements, it gives you a better start.

"I saw that you have applied 35 custom fields on the Server table. Why is that and is it still necessary?" is a better question than "Which CI tables have customized attributes? Justifications?" simply because they probably don't know and need to look it up.

[Anish Reghu]

Thanks Mark. Good suggestion. I apologize for mixing up my words. It's not a client yet, have updated the question accordingly. We are in the bidding stage. Hope now it makes it clear. As you said, if we had access to the instance, yes statements is a more professional approach. No doubt!

Regards,

Anish

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

In that case, group your questions to make sense. Ask everything related to customizations at the same time, ask about the CMDB Heath dashboard usage and if they don't, tell them what it does and can help them with. If they do, ask them what they see on it. 

Grouping your questions makes it easy to get to them when a topic is being discussed so you don't need to return to a reporting question when you already went through them.

It also depends on who you are sitting with. Is it the IT Director that wants his CMDB cleaned up, or is it the CMDB team that just doesn't know where to start. 

I think you should have your questions with you (I don't have any to add), but let the conversation be lead by them. What do they want, what do they need? What are their expectations, what is their ideal outcome? And use your questions to get the information they aren't sharing themselves and use examples for why you are suggesting anything (also: this depends on who you are talking to).

[Ashok Sasidhara]

Refine the question related to health dashboard a little bit. I would suggest to mention 'health metrics' instead of 'parameters' so that they are more clear (assuming they use the dashboard). Also if they are not using it, add one more question there about how they are handling duplicate, orphan and stale CIs currently. May be you can remove your question 1 about duplicate CIs and ask about that also here itself.

Ask specifically about how they are managing HAM currently. Also ask whether they currently have a definition of how HAM process interacts with configuration management process and about whether they currently perform tasks to keep the CI and Asset data in sync. 

Also add a question about the list of CI classes currently populated in their CMDB, the name of data sources which populate each CI class and the business objective of each CI class. As it is a clean up initiative, any CI class which is not needed to support some business objective can be identified as a probable candidate for clean up.

In addition, check whether they have any policies for CI retention, archival and deletion. If not, recommend about defining these so that older CIs can be archived and deleted as per the duration defined in these policies. This is important for periodic clean up of CMDB.

Another important question will be to check if they are using data certification or any audit process for manual verification of any attributes (especially important attributes which are manually updated).