Costs of service, offering, or CI

[Alan Prochaska]

How should costs be captured in CSDM .... for services, for offerings, for applications, for CIs?

I find one attribute "Cost" on application and server CIs.  Our partners want to see current month, last month, and YTD (actual, and actual vs budget).

We collect operating costs off-platform in Apptio, and are ready to pull them back on-platform.  What tables and fields can we drop them into in the CMDB?

Thanks for any help.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @Alan Prochaska 

Costs for CIs should be tracked via their related Asset record. Assets are where financials should be captured, either via related Expense Lines or via Contracts and the Asset Covered many-to-many table. Bear in mind that for any CI where you want to track costs you need to ensure that its Model Category has an Asset class mapped so that assets are created automatically. I wrote a blog on this a while back: https://www.servicenow.com/community/in-other-news/assets-configuration-items-and-model-categories-u...

For Service Offerings, it depends on what you want to capture. There is a Price field on the form, but that's for charge models to the consumer. You could look at the Contracts related list, which will allow you to capture financials perhaps?

I hope this helps!

Mat

[Carter1]

Hi Alan,

Mat's response reflects how ServiceNow intends financials to be handled natively, and it's a solid starting point.

Where I've seen teams go from there is exactly what you're asking about. Things like month-over-month, YTD, budget vs. actuals, or unit costs rolled up across services, offerings, or applications; not just captured at the CI or asset level.

For transparency, Proven Optics works in this space and provides on-platform cost models aligned to CSDM, including the ability to manage the underlying financial data for rollups, trending, and budget-to-actual comparisons. Independent of tooling, the key is having a consistent and traceable way to manage cost data as it rolls up through your model.