Why does our CMDB look “complete” but still fail during incidents and changes?
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2 hours ago
Hi Community,
On paper, our CMDB looks solid—CIs are populated, relationships exist, and data quality reports look acceptable.
However, during incidents and changes, teams still struggle to identify impact, ownership, or the right group to engage. It feels like we have data, but not usable context.
A few questions I’m hoping to learn from:
Which CMDB attributes or relationships have the biggest impact during real incidents?
How do you enforce CI ownership and lifecycle so the CMDB stays actionable?
At what point did your CMDB start delivering value beyond reporting and audits?
Interested to hear what made the biggest difference for others.
Post-fix /Answer Solution:
After digging into this, the issue wasn’t missing CIs—it was missing ownership, lifecycle enforcement, and usable relationships.
What made the biggest difference:
Enforcing owned by / managed by on every CI and tying it to assignment and escalation
Aligning CI lifecycle status with Incident and Change workflows (retired really means retired)
Focusing relationships on what responders actually need during impact analysis, not modeling everything
Governing updates through Change instead of allowing silent CI drift
Once the CMDB was treated as an operational tool instead of a reporting asset, incidents and changes became faster and far less guessy. The CMDB finally started delivering value inside ServiceNow, not just looking good on dashboards.
Thumbs up if find this article useful. Thanks Kindly!
