CMDB Data Acquisition Best Practices/Process

clyon
Tera Guru

‎02-03-2022 09:19 AM

We are in the processing of separating from our parent company and we are pulling the CMDB (~25 tables) over from there to our business. We had some CMDB data to begin with, we pulled weekly  data from some of the tables from our parent company where they were our system of record.

We have quite the mixed bag of data and I’m trying to determine the best way to pull the data over and get it done correct the first time and have a very short timeline in which to get this done. Any one have any best practices/suggestions from when they have done this?  TIA

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CMDB Whisperer
Mega Sage
Mega Sage

‎02-03-2022 10:00 AM

Take a look at the Instance Migrator from PrecisionBridge. It is the best and most flexible tool I have seen to do this.  It allows you to transform the data, and run the extractions repeatedly over a period of time.  So you could for example filter the records by Department or Business Unit, change the Company data for every record you are pulling, and then keep running the process until all of your data in the target instance is validated.  Any you only pay for licensing during the time you use the tool.  Pretty slick.  And no I don't work for them.

https://precisionbridge.net/instance-migrator


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

SebastianKunzke
Kilo Sage
Kilo Sage

‎02-03-2022 11:33 PM

In my understanding the best practice would be to decide for one method ServiceNow describes here. My preferred way to move data is to use xml-files.

But overall you need to be careful and you should check:

  1. Are the relationships on the CI  you need?
  2. Do you have related objects you also want to transfer? They need to be imported before you start the import of the CMDB object.
  3. Do you have custom fields in the existing CMDB, you want to have in the new CMDB as well?

I would suggest you to build a short dependency map for every class, where you draw down the related objects. Based on that schedule the import sequence for various tables. Then use on of the upper methods and test, if they successful.

An alternative, but more experienced way would be to use a REST API. There you could also request directly the related objects. But that would require som sort of scripting. 

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