Looking for guidance on using the "life cycle stage" and "life cycle status" fields

[Suggy]

Hello,

We are starting with CMDB project in a new Washington instance, where we will populate physical and logical and conceptual CIs.

I am looking for guidance on which fields to use to track the status of a CI/Asset?

Should I use the old fields - install status/hardware status/operational status or use the newer fields "life cycle stage" and "life cycle status" fields?

If I need to use the "life cycle stage" and "life cycle status" fields, please do share the steps on how to use them?

Also read in few posts that life Cycle fields should be used for logical CIs like Business Service, Technical Service and Offering. Is that true?

Thanks much in advance!

[David104]

Hi Suggy,

Do you have access to NowCreate? There is a great PPT on there to explain the Life Cycle Stage and Life Cycle Status, across a number of different tables, including Locations, Contracts, Product Models, CDSM Build Domain, and then across CSDM Manage and Consume domains also. This covers the uses of the stages and statuses across both Asset and CI tables with some great diagrams to help explain it.

The doc is called "CMDB Lifecycle Stage and Status Migration", and can be found here if you have access - https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/nowcreate?id=nc_asset&asset_id=27e8d18847213110db63fb25126d436f&n...

In short, if you are starting fresh, then I would say yes, use the new attributes. These are what is used in CMDB data manager and most like throughout other areas such as Service Portfolio Management, Application Portfolio Management etc

Cheers,

David

[SteveMacWWT]

@Suggy The use of the new lifecycle fields is not fully in place yet, so while you are doing the right thing by moving towards their usage, you need to ensure you keep the 'old' fields up to date. Fortunately ServiceNow has provided functionality to automate the work to do so. 

@David Skowronek has provided an extremely useful article with details and recommendations on how to manage this using what ServiceNow has provided.