Flag for review in CMDB

[Morgan Berry]

Quick question, I can see a lot of way to accomplish this, but looking to see what has worked for others.

We have come a long way in the cleanup of our CMDB, but there is always that one record, or ten, that someone sees that has data in it (so not flagged by Health checks), but the data is just incorrect. As we move toward better governance of the records, what would be a good way to accomplish the following without asking for certification/audits constantly?

1) I see a record with one or more fields with incorrect Data

2) I "flag" it for review to the Managed By Group

3) They review and make recommendations for approval/change by the Managed By or Owner.

4) I can report off of this activity.

Thoughts?

[Ashok Sasidhara]

Hello Morgan. I agree that it is important to improve the CMDB data quality as quickly as possible and also to take preventive actions to reduce data quality issues in future. But depending on the current size of your CMDB and also based on current state of data quality, addressing all the data quality issues can take a lot of time and hence I mentioned all those as various recommended initiatives. It is great if you are doing those already.

You can leverage CMDB health tasks which can be assigned to relevant groups to review different kinds of data quality issues. The tasks can be enabled for Required, Recommended, Orphan and Staleness metrics using following steps (Also highlighted in attached screenshot):

1. Navigate to Configuration>Health Preference

2. Select the metric from the 'Select Metric' field

3. Turn on 'Create task' and then select a 'Task assignee group' (Mention any group which is responsible for CMDB data quality)

Note: Apart from the tasks created from these metrics, de-duplication tasks will be created for remediating duplicate CIs based on duplicates identified via identification rules.

Hope you are already using CMDB and CSDM data foundations dashboard. If not, it should be definitely used as it gives a view into various insights related to CMDB data quality and CSDM alignment. Following is the URL to the store app of this for your reference (It can be activated from the plugins section within the instance for free):

https://store.servicenow.com/sn_appstore_store.do#!/store/application/5c0b68e35300101032b7ddeeff7b12...

I would also suggest to make use of the CMDB 360 feature if you are not using it already. This will be useful if you are populating some of the CI classes using multiple data sources. Following is the URL about that:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-management/co...

Once you upgrade to Vancouver release, you can make use of the 'Insights' tab on the CMDB workspace for some more insights about what all can be done to improve the CMDB.

[Morgan Berry]

Ashok, yes, all those things are in place, but as you said, it is a long effort to clean (especially since most of our CMDB was imported at the start).  Hence the lockdown (stopping the bleeding of manual edits).  Thanks.

[Dr Atul G- LNG · Accepted solution]

Hi @Morgan Berry 

Greetings!!

Thanks for detailed update. Yesterday I was in SNUG event and pick up your use case and one of expert suggested me CDMB Data Manager. Have a look in to this:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-manageme...

[Morgan Berry]

Thanks.  Yeah we have implemented and just waiting on a Discovery issue before we pull the trigger on the retirements (and then the archival).  We are already using for attestation, but certification is better fit for field level, and we have used that already for things (not just CMDB).  Have a great weekend.