How many ways are there for Populating the CMDB ?

newhand
Mega Sage

‎09-21-2022 04:23 AM

I am learning CMDB,
At the first step of learning.... I am stuck.

I read a lot of documentation and still can't figure out how many ways are there for importing data into CMDB.

In the documentation below, it seems that all the options are listed. But there is one paragraph that I'm confused.

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

This part

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ITIL configuration management auto-discovery

The key to any configuration management business practice is the initial and on-going inventory or discovery of what you own. The ServiceNow platform provides three options for auto-discovery:     !!! question1:  There are 3 options mentioned here, but only 2 are listed below..
  • The separate and highly robust Discovery product.  !!! question2:  This means ServiceNow Discovery?
  • For organizations that want to leverage the discovery technologies they already have deployed (SMS, Tally NetCensus, LanDesk, and so on), the ServiceNow platform supports integrations to those technologies via web services. Scanned data can be mapped directly into the CMDB.  !!!question3:Seems like something about [IntegrationHub ETL]?

For further information on designing, constructing, and maintaining the CMDB, see the CMDB Design & Configuration white paper.   !!! question 3: In fact, I can't get any more information about [ITIL configuration management auto-discovery] from this link.

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From the perspective of the document structure, this content is at the same level as the following [Discovery] and [Integrate third-party data using IntegrationHub ETL], introducing a options of filling data. However, I feel that he actually just summarizes [Discovery] and [Integrate third-party data using IntegrationHub ETL]. I don't know if this understanding is correct.

I don't want to rant, but ServiceNow's documentation is really hard to read.
Can anyone help me understand this part, thanks a lot.

 

 

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Niklas Peterson
Mega Sage
Mega Sage

‎10-07-2022 01:06 AM

Hi,

There are many ways to populate CMDB, and you need a combination of most of them to get good data quality.

  • Manual – Not ideal but needed for attributes that cannot be discovered or imported
  • ServiceNow Discovery product
    • Horizontal Discovery – Scanning the network for devices
    • Cloud Discovery – API based, querying the Cloud environments for Resources.
    • Agent Client Collector – Agent based discovery
  • Service Graph Connectors – Prebuilt integrations
  • Import Sets

The best methods uses the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) to secure the data quality.

 

Also have a look at https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-management/c... to see how you can leverage multiple sources.

Regards,
Niklas