CSDM Life Cycle Mapping : uni-directional v bi-directional

[Alec Hanson]

Hi,

I am going through the migration to the CSDM Life Cycle standard and am aware of the bi-directional use of the life cycle mapping for CIs - 2 BRs:

- Update legacy from CSDM

- Update life cycle from legacy

However I can not see anywhere where this bi-directional capability is set to work for Assets, Contracts or Models - they seem to just be Uni-directional with the only BR being: Update life cycle from legacy

Has anyone else seem this?

[CMDB Whisperer]

This is not a complete answer to your question, but CSDM Lifecycles are still a work in progress, and bi-directional synchronization is not yet fully supported.  The language coming from the CSDM Team is "there's no rush to implement CSDM Lifecycle" and we should heed that advice for now.  I would strongly advise not to consider depending on the bi-directional capabilities yet, regardless of whether those business rules are in place.  Bottom line is that these business rules are relatively new and likely to cause problems between CIs and Assets.  The reason for this has to do with the way that the AssetCISynchronizer and the related business rules operate.  In short, there are already multiple status fields on the CIs and multiple status fields on the Asset, and then adding an additional set of fields that try to stay in sync is complex enough, let alone trying to do this in both directions.  I have seen various permutations where fields do not synchronize, and I plan to document these in an article in the hopes of contributing to the maturation of this feature, but from what I have seen thus far, the only use of CSDM Lifecycles on CIs and Assets should be one-directional, and Lifecycle Stages should be read-only on both the CI and the Asset record, and should not be updated directly.

[Alec Hanson]

Hi @CMDB Whisperer that is the conclusion I was coming to having found a few situations where the syncronisation does not work. but also therefore makes me now believe there is no value in Activating the Life Cycle standards.

It also frustrates me somehwhat. I know that ServiceNow release features that are not fully working and I do understand why. However for me to implement CMDB Data Manager I need to Activate Life Cycle standards and by working uni-directional it means implementing technical debt when we know something is Legacy - i.e. any workflows, scripts etc we develop still need to be on the Legacy fields.

Thanks

[David Schafer]

Well that was somewhat depressing... 🙂

We recently marched ahead with CSDM CI Lifecycle in order to leverage Data Manager functionality. Based upon my take of your assessment, this would appear to be an ok path to continue on as long as we don't rely on bi-directional synchronization of the various status fields at play. Or.. does Data Manager have its own set of concerning quirks as well? Thoughts? Thank you!

[PG2]

Hi there, has anyone learnt anything further since these last posts. We're hitting the same hurdle. We are activating the new CSDM life cycling for CIs. The reverse synchronisation is a step in the right direction, however, the current capability does not cater for the fact that two different lifecycle stages/states could actually map back to a single operational status.

Our hurdle could also be self inflicted because we currently manage lifecycle using a single attribute only (operational status).