CMDB IRE suggetion

[konijetisumanth]

Hi Community

I need help regarding an IRE decision making.

As we know the serial number is taken as Unique values for all classes in CMDB, but I have a requirement from my client asking me to change "Name' as highest priority, which is previously "200" to "50".

So that the discovery or integration go with name not only with serial number.

So, my question is.

1. Is it fine to make the name as highest priority.
2. Will there be any problem by making name is priority.
3. If is it a bad decision then plz give me the reason why i should not do these changes.

[s4scott]

Name should only be used if it is the only identifier available. Most devices readily allow for their name to change making it a very poor identifier for a specific device. Many organizations will name replacement devices the same as the retired device.

When ServiceNow identifies a device to an existing record, it overwrites the data in that record. If you have more than one device with a name, only one device record will appear and it's attributes will constantly flip between each of the different source values. This can be problematic if there are any financial or regulatory requirements to maintain an accurate inventory of specific devices. 

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

There are a variety of reasons that it would be inadvisable to prioritize name, but they all boil down to this: you'll end up with more duplicates and resolving those duplicates will involve more time, effort, and risk.

It might seem like IRE can prevent you from having duplicates if you have good identifiers and good data sources.  But we know in practice that this is not the case.  IRE mitigates the risk of duplication, but duplication is and always will be a risk.   Having duplicate CIs can lead to a variety of situations in your IT operations.  People are not informed because their CI isn't included in a change, so there is a risk of a service outage due to inadequate planning.  Or an incident is not properly routed to the team because a duplicate CI was associated with the incident instead and it didn't have the right configuration data.  Bottom line is: duplicates are bad and you should avoid them.  IRE was meant to do that, and what it comes down to is that, by definition, the most unique fields are the best identifiers and thus should have a higher priority.  Period.  Serial number is clearly more unique than name.  (If that's not clear, let me know, but I'm assuming this is understood).

That said, to me it sounds like this request may be coming from a specific situation or concern, so perhaps understanding more of the requirement would help provide additional guidance.  But I don't think it will change the recommendation, which is to keep things as they are configured OOB and only adjust the priorities of identifiers if you can legitimately demonstrate that one is more unique than the other.