How does your organization manage missing CIs?

[aditityagi]

While advanced CMDB capabilities like Service Mapping, CSDM alignment, and Now Assist are key milestones, I want to address a more fundamental question: How do we manage known assets that fail onboarding (due to credential issues, missing data, etc.) and become invisible to the CMDB despite running in the environment?

This raises a crucial governance debate: Should a CMDB only contain fully discovered, validated CIs to maintain trust, or should it use a "Missing CI Registry" or placeholder records to track known gaps with assigned ownership and target resolution dates?

While CMDB maturity is measured by Completeness, Correctness, and Compliance, perhaps we should also measure the "Known unmanaged CI percentage." A healthy CMDB requires visibility into what exists outside the database, making data quality a shared responsibility across technology towers.

I would love to hear from the community:

1.  How does your organization manage missing CIs?
2.  Do you maintain a Missing CI Registry or Exception Register? excel tracker or in servicenow ?
3.  Do you use placeholder/candidate CIs, or only fully discoverable CIs?
4.  What KPIs do you use to measure unmanaged CI risk?

Looking forward to your insights.