How to Track the softwares in CMDB for Incidents

[Community Alums]

The "Affected CI" is a mandatory attribute for closing an incident. If the Service Desk cannot find a suitable CI, they often use a generic or dummy CI to map incidents and close them. The generic CI is named 'Application' and lacks ownership and support group information. From a CMDB perspective, we want to restrict the use of generic CIs and guide them to map to the appropriate CIs, allowing them to leverage CI information to assign incidents to the right teams.

The challenge is that incidents are raised for software like Google Chrome, DbVisualizer, Quest/Toad, etc., which are installed software. The Service Desk typically resolves these, but if not, they escalate to L2 and find various ways to identify the appropriate teams. There are many such software applications in our organization.

I am just wondering if anyone encountered this scenario? What is the best approach for a suitable CI in this case? Should we use a generic CI owned by the Helpdesk team or create individual CIs for each installed software? 

Thank you

[Ashok Sasidhara]

It is important to create CIs for every infrastructure component for which your organization needs to raise incidents, problems, changes etc. So you must create individual CIs in the correct CI classes, populate their important attributes (like name, serial no, support group etc.) and configure the relationships with other CIs. If you have discovery or any integrations already in place, first check for presence of already existing CIs before creating new ones. For the already existing CIs, populate missing information (E.g. support group) and configure any missing relationships. Also check specifically about configuring relationships of CIs with services and service offerings. This will give a better idea about which services are impacted by an incident or change. Refer CSDM 4.0 whitepaper for understanding more about this topic.

It is also important to create awareness among the end users and the various support teams (E.g. Incident resolver groups, change implementation teams etc.) about how they need to choose the specific CIs as part of incidents or changes. This can be done by delivering training sessions and by periodically sending some mailers explaining these. It would also be useful create a knowledge article related to this topic.

Check out my following article for some of the best practices to be considered for managing the CMDB data.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/cmdb-articles/best-practices-for-cmdb-data-management/ta-p/2841...

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

You are giving your own answer: you don't want generic CI's to be used, but you don't have the correct ones available. So it's up to you what you want to do. Both ways have upsides and downsides. You aren't able to report on the applications themselves at this moment and if that's the requirement: create the CI's. Your servicedesk won't like that, because at this moment they just fill in the generic one and are done. Searching for the correct one will cost extra time (and will show how well they do their job). 

Since we don't know your instance and don't know what you already have (I assume SAM is not part of your instance, otherwise you would already have the software): I would create the software 'models' as CI (don't go for versioning, unless you really want to). And have a mandatory string field when they select 'other' or 'application' that they need to fill to define the software if it's not in the list. You can report on that and decide if its indeed another software you need to add. 

[Community Alums]

@Mark Manders 

Thanks for your response. We do not have SAM at the moment. But we do have software models populated from Flexera integration (SAM too) into ServiceNow Custom tables. I can't use these table for Incidents as it is not extended from CMDB tables. I will check the option of creating software models as CI's probably in Business application class, 

[Mark Manders]

Why can't you use the custom table for incidents? Just add a reference field to your custom table on the incident form and you're done.