CMDB Design Decision: Ping probes

jrbockrath
Kilo Contributor

14 hours ago

CMDB Design Decision

Would you make the same call?

During onboarding, we found a ScienceLogic export containing approximately 2,300 "devices."

After reviewing the records, 419 of them appeared to be Ping/ICMP probe artifacts rather than actual configuration items.

Characteristics included:

  • No serial number

  • No MAC address

  • Hostname was simply the IP address

  • No additional identifying attributes

The design question became:

Would you allow these records to become CIs, or would you exclude them before they entered the CMDB?

Our conclusion was to exclude them because they represented monitoring artifacts rather than managed configuration items. In this case, that reduced the candidate population by roughly 18%.

I'm curious how others approach this. Is this something you would treat as a discovery configuration issue, an identification issue, or simply an upstream governance decision?

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pr8172510
Kilo Sage

an hour ago

Hi @jrbockrath,

 

 the CMDB should contain managed configuration items that are relevant to your organization's operations and can be reliably identified.

If the ICMP/Ping-discovered records contain only an IP address and lack sufficient identifying attributes (such as a serial number, MAC address, hostname, or other attributes required by your identification strategy), I would recommend filtering them before they are imported into the CMDB.

From a design perspective, I would treat this primarily as an upstream data quality and governance decision.


It's also worth reviewing the discovery configuration or import process so that records which do not meet your organization's CI inclusion criteria are excluded before they reach the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE).

This approach helps maintain a high-quality CMDB while reducing unnecessary or duplicate CI records.

 

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