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]

Attestation is intended for verifying that a CI record represents something that still exists in an operational sense.  If a CI fails attestation, then that record becomes a candidate for retirement and subsequent archive or deletion.

Certification is intended to verify that data in records in tables being certified is correct.  Unlike Attestation, Certification is not limited to just CI classes and can be used to certify data in Location tables, Group tables, etc. Certification is typically used to verify non-discoverable data that's often manually updated. 

To summarize,

• Attestation verifies a CI record represents something that's still being managed, if not then the CI record should be retired/removed from the CMDB.
• Certification verifies the data in a record is accurate, if not then the data needs to be updated.

[Joshua Chen FX]

@Tony Branton  is there ootb flow that triggers if the attestation task fail, or you would need to use cmdb data manager and configure a policy using the attestation task result as a trigger to archive/delete, etc.?

or simply flow designer ?

[Tony Branton]

In Data Attestation, CIs that fail attestation have their attestation_status field set to "Rejected". Attestation tasks have their status set to "Closed Complete" when all CIs have been reviewed and the task is submitted.

Once an Attestation task has been submitted no further operations are performed OOTB i.e. no flows or business rules are triggered.

You can create a Data Manager Retire policy that selects CI records whose attestation_status field = Rejected and then subsequently archive or delete the retired CI records using a separate Data Manager policy. Retire/archive/delete operations performed by Data Manager generate tasks that provide a record of what was done.

[Joshua Chen FX]

@Tony Branton  thank you,

what about the ''attested'' field on cmdb_ci? it doesnt look like it gets updated. what is this field used for?

[Tony Branton]

The Attestation Score and Attested fields were added to the cmdb_ci table prior to the development of the Data Attestation feature. During the design phase, the Attested boolean field could not be adequately used to track the attestation status and is now redundant.  Similarly, logic for calculating an Attestation Score could not be defined and became another redundant field.

Today the only fields in the CI tables used for attestation are attested_by, attested_date and attestation_status.