Create Groups in CMDB or Business Services

[cnharris1]

Good afternoon,

Is it possible to create logical groups of devices from the CMDB or Business Services?

For example, I want to group together a list of servers at one office location or I want to group together all of the workstations in our Seattle location.

Is this possible in ServiceNow? If so, how would I go about doing that?

Any guidance will be greatly appreciated!

Best regards,

cnharris

[SebastianKunzke · Accepted solution]

Hi cnharris,

This is possible in ServiceNow. The function is named CMDB group. These objects allow you to define groups with individual filter. This groups can be used in Service relationships or if you scheduled to implement a holistic view of your dependencies (Therefor ServiceNow has the CSDM framework)

We have two things you have to be aware:

1. You have a limit of CIs you can query with one CMDB group. (But this is high, I never reached it)
2. The CMDB group does not create a relationship to the CIs, so you are not able to use the dependency map.

In case the docs do not give you enough guidance,  please reach out again.

Have fun trying it out.

Sebastian

[cnharris1]

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for responding! I'm still working on the CMDB groups but think I have the gist of it down. I do have a question, can a CI be apart of multiple groups?

Best regards,

cnharris

[#4]

Yes, and that is a good differentiation to call out in this use case.  The location field is a reference so a CI can only have 1 location.  If you create groups the CIs are tied via a relationship so you can have a many to many relationship between CIs and groups.

[cnharris1]

Thanks jgates for clearing that up for me! The CMDB is a new area for me and my organization is starting from the ground up trying to get everything flowing like it should. We have discovery but it was set up before I began working here so I'm still trying to figure that out as well.

Best regards,

cnharris