Identify a Server in the CMDB (cmdb_ci_server) as a Database Server

[Suvetha S]

Hi All,

Is there any method to determine if there is an automatic method of deriving if a server is a database server from CMDB.  (e.g., relationship to a database instance automatically or with a manual flag) . 

We are looking for the best practices to determine what are the servers (cmdb_ci_server)which has database instance running them. Please share your inputs. 

[Rahul Singh7]

Hi,

Please take a look at the below community post :

https://www.servicenow.com/community/itom-forum/what-is-the-difference-between-database-server-and-d...

[CMDB Whisperer]

Another similar question I have often heard asked is: can I query what role(s) a given Server plays within the Application stack?  Is it part of the Database tier, or the Application tier?

I think this question might be a bit more to the point.  The term "Database Server" is ambiguous, as is the term "Application Server".  On the other hand answering the question of what role(s) a Server plays in an Application Stack can be determined by whether it is responsible for running an Application or Database Instance that is part of that stack.  And technically it can serve both roles.  The problem then becomes determining whether the Applications and Database Instances are part of that stack, or whether they happen to be running on the Server in a manner unrelated to the operability of the stack.  So for this reason I don't think you're going to have a fool-proof method to determine which role(s) your Server plays in the stack.  You could certainly define some logic that attempts to do so, based on what Applications or Database Instances are installed and running on the Server, and whether those CIs are associated to the Application Service, and then set some custom attribute(s) on the Server.  That's probably the closest you'll get to a true indicator of the role of that Server plays.  That said, I haven't seen this actually done.  In my experience the reason for the request usually has to do with determining who owns or supports the server, or how the server should be managed.  While tagging the Server according to its role may seem like a useful way to answer those questions, I've found that it is generally putting the cart before the horse.  Though personally I can still imagine it being useful to have this data for ease of querying, I have not seen anyone go through the pain of defining it this way.  More often I have just seen the manual tagging approach, which of course is less reliable, and ultimately maintaining this data manually may not be worth the effort in terms of how the data is actually used.

[SuvethaS]

Hi @CMDB Whisperer 

Thanks for your inputs. We are trying to achieve the requirement by running a report on the cmdb relationship table and we could not find any appropriate filter to run and collect the list of servers. Is there any other method available to fetch?