What exactly is Data Certification vs CI Attestation?

[Suggy]

What exactly is Data Certification vs CI Attestation? What are the use cases for- each of them? In which scenario which feature should be used?

[Tony Branton]

Reasons why Attestation and Certification are separate today:

• Attestation preceded Certification as a Data Manager user case
• Attestation is focused on CI records and relies on dedicated fields in CI tables
• Attestation is intended to identify CI records that can subsequently be retired/archived/deleted if the records are marked as rejected.
• Certification can be performed on CI and non-CI tables and does not use dedicated fields in the tables
• Data Manager-based Certification initially is a replacement for the legacy version that is being deprecated with the aim of providing an equivalent capability.

If Attestation were to be combined with Certification:

• It would only be available for certifying records in CI tables since these are the only tables with fields specific to attestation
• An option would be added to the Certification policy type allowing records to be attested during certification
• Some attestation features may not be supported in Certification e.g.
  • Marking records as duplicates
  • Excluding CIs
  • "Smart Detection"
• We would need to determine the criteria for attesting/rejecting a CI record e.g.
  • Is a CI rejected if all fields fail certification?
  • Is a CI attested if at least one field passes certification?
  • Should a separate control (e.g. checkbox) be used to attest/reject a CI record?
• How to handle CI records attested via certification by separate [overlapping] Attestation policies

There's merit in the idea, however there's some complexity involved. Although we plan to explore this capability, there's no commitment that it will be delivered at this stage.

[Damhoej]

The big difference is that Attestation can be run on CIs whereas Certification can be run all over the instance

[Ofer1]

I view attestation as a simpler subset of certification. I would choose one depending on the use case, but not both.
Here is a video I posted about Data Certification.
https://youtu.be/TlrWqTZx0XU?list=PL5DgOfLBA3RanN94xRB4tZGY6aoKeFM_b

[Tony Branton · Accepted solution]

Data Attestation focuses on data currency.  You use Attestation to verify that a CI record represents a resources that still exists in your organization. If a CI record fails attestation (e.g. the resource it represents no longer exists) then it becomes a candidate for being retired and removed from the CMDB.

Data Certification focuses on data quality. Fields in records (in CMDB or non-CMDB tables) are reviewed for accuracy and can be updated, or marked as failed and subsequently updated with accurate values.

[Ronald Lucas TA]

@Tony Branton, I was told by someone at ServiceNow support that Data Certification isn't being updated because it will be depreciated at some point in the near future. Is this true?