Progressing the CMDB

[Steven Barber]

Hello all,

I have been working as a CMDB Admin for a year and a half now.

We are discovering computers, window and Linux servers, switches, routers, access points, firewalls, F5s.
I have setup data manager to retire and archive CIs.
I've turned on the network device exploration in configuration console in order to see the physical connections using dependency view.
We are working on the CSDM at this time as well.

Is there any advice as to what else I can do to add more to the CMDB?

Thank you.

[AJ-TechTrek]

Hi @Steven Barber ,

The main things you need to focus on CMDB Health Dashboard , there should not be Duplicate CI, Stale CI and Other attribute detail which required by customer to maintain and up to date the CMDB.

Also CI relationship with Application and CI should be update on time to time is the mani factors.

Please appreciate the efforts of community contributors by marking appropriate response as Mark my Answer Helpful or Accept Solution this may help other community users to follow correct solution in future.

Thanks

AJ

Linkedin Profile:- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajay-kumar-66a91385/

[Dr Atul G- LNG · Accepted solution]

Hi @Steven Barber 

Seems i missed your post 😞

Is there any advice as to what else I can do to add more to the CMDB?

Atul: Now, as you said and i assume CMDB is mature and now you need start introducing the CSDM part ,means bring Service / Service offering and relationship.,

I will say for these white paper, mainly last few pages (crawl - walk- run - fly)

https://www.servicenow.com/community/common-service-data-model/it-is-time-csdm-4-0-draft-white-paper...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLi0Ik1xCDEbLzEpjQFl0LcT3MpjPcOAs5

ServiceNow CSDM 4.0 - YouTube

[Tony K]

My best piece of advice is to make sure their is buy in from management about the value and use of the CMDB. Otherwise it doesn't matter what fancy features or dashboards there are if no one uses them or sees the value. You need class owners, someone needs to be the owner of the CMDB to make sure processes are followed and kept up to date. Everyone needs to use/trust the CMDB as a source of truth and ditch spreadsheets and other external sources. Management needs to back it and come out and tell people to use it to show their support for it. Class owners need to make sure their classes are kept up to date. Meaning use features like remediation tasks for stale, duplicates, recommended fields etc. 

That's just my take..

[Ashok Sasidhara]

Following are some of the action items which you can consider:

1. Configure the CMDB health metrics for the most important CI classes. This will help to track the health scores on the CMDB health dashboard and take actions to improve the data quality.

2. Activate the free plugin 'CMDB and CSDM data foundations dashboard'. After activating, go to 'CMDB health dashboard' to view insights about areas where you can improve the CMDB data quality. Also go to 'CSDM data foundations dashboard' to view insights about your CSDM alignment status and how to improve it. Both the dashboards have playbooks against each metric mentioned there. The playbook will describe the importance of each metric and about the steps which you can take to improve the metric scores.

3. Make use of 'Data certification' for periodic manual verification of important attributes in key CI classes which are maintained manually. 

4. Review the identification and reconciliation rules of the key CI classes. Check whether those need to be modified. These are important to prevent ingestion of bad quality data. They are explained in the following URL:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-manageme...

5. If you are integrating with any 3rd party tool, consider using service graph connector (if available). Then only the data population from integrations will consider the identifier entries defined for each CI class. For the same reason, make use of integration hub ETL for any manual bulk data imports into the CMDB.

6. Most important thing is to ensure that CMDB governance and configuration management process is always being followed properly.

Also check the CMDB insights from your workspace (explained in following URL) to get suggestions from within your instance:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-manageme...

Let me know if you have additional queries about any of the points.