How to Remediate CI Staleness - Best Practice and Workflows

[Tom104]

Hi,

I'm in a position where I'm managing a CMDB that has circa 50k CIs that have gone stale, and I'm looking at automating the staleness remediation (Somehow), as it's not feasible to review these manually.

Having checked the forums, a number of you have suggested the use of "Workflows", but on trying to create the remediation rule, no workflows are available.

I've gone to "workflow designer" and created a couple, but they still don't appear for me.

Is there something I'm doing wrong here, or is this something that could be locked by an administrator? (They do hate us having access rights to anything!)

Also, is there any notable change when a CI is marked non-operational? It'd be great if anyone had any clear examples of best practice.

Thanks.

[Mark Bodman]

I suggest that you use the CMDB Data Manager that is now available starting in ROME.  We cover how that works in this video.  It provides a workflow for you and deals with your Retirement, Archival, and Deletion scenarios.  

[Rod135]

Imagine What would happen if your IT Asset reports reported dozens of extra machines in the data center that didn't exist? Your company might pay tens of thousands of dollars on extra maintenance. Decisions for future software license purchases based on the number of computers in your data center are just as badly affected by having stale data in your CMDB. Or consider all the effort that goes into configuration management on your data center and how important it is the CMDB be accurate for IT processes to work.

Staples Advantage Login

[felixmiske]

Bit late to the party - but just looking into the same problem field:

1. Regarding @Mark Bodman recommendation to use the Data Manager Lifecycle approach: that viable if you have higher value CIs for which you actually want Lifecycle Management. For example for server CIs.
2. In other cases, you might not want to bother with Lifecycle Management and just straight up want to delete stale CIs - for example IP Addresses.

For case 2, the original questions approach of using Remediation Rules with associated Workflows still seems to be the way to go.

And now to answer the actual question: `The table in the workflow must match the task type in the remediation rule.` [ServiceNow Docs: Create a CMDB remediation rule](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/xanadu-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-managem...

Means if the Remediation Rule is for Task Type Stale Cl Remediation, the workflow table must be [stale_ci_remediation].