Create Groups in CMDB or Business Services

cnharris1 · ‎01-05-2022

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 · ‎01-05-2022

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:

You have a limit of CIs you can query with one CMDB group. (But this is high, I never reached it)
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

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Tobias · ‎01-06-2022

I might add that you can associate the CMDB group with a 'Dynamic CI Group'

This allows you to use the group as a CI in tickets, changes etc. Furthermore in Rome the ci's in the group should automatically be associated change as affected CI's when using the dynamic ci group.

Alternatively you (also) utilize location attribute, though this means updating a lot of CIs.

MBannis · ‎07-28-2023

Hello Tobias,

Thanks for that explanation, So if I may, Dynamic CI Groups are represented as Technical Services in ServiceNow correct? but is it also the case that these Dynamic CI groups show no relationships (like the explanation provided above by Sebastian)?

I'm trying to get a better handle on the use of Business Services / Technical Services / etc using the CSDM 4.0 model and best practices associated with that.

Report Inappropriate Content · ‎01-06-2022

While cmdb_ci_group is certainly a possibility, it sounds like you are trying to populate the location field on cmdb_ci. This is a reference field to the location table (cmn_location). This would allow you to group by location within the list view making reporting easy.

Follow this doc for steps on how to populate the location table.

Populating the reference to the location can often be done in a scripted way using some business logic like ip address or through some source of information.