Missing relationship rule causes false CMDB Health results

[Ingrid de Cerqu]

We are currently implementing the CMDB in ServiceNow following CSDM best practices.

We just populated the Application Services and the Technical Service Offerings tables, and related these using the "Contains" relationship as recommended by CSDM.

But then, when going to the CMDB View Dashboard under “Relationship Health”, I see lots of “Relationships not compliant with all relationship rules” records.

One of the rules that we are not compliant with is that “cmdb_ci_service” does not have a suggested relationship to itself.
Because Technical Service Offerings and Application Services both inherit the suggested relationships from “cmdb_ci_service”, we are getting this error.

I created a case in Now Support, but they replied that I can create the Suggested Relationships rules myself.

But shouldn't these come from OOTB, as e.g., the suggested relationships for Business Applications to Services?

I think that adding this suggested relationship rule to the OOTB configurations wouldn't hurt, and would improve the adoption of CSDM best practices for first time implementers.

[Mathew Hillyard]

 @Ingrid de Cerqu,

Do you mean that because there is no suggested relationship record where Base class = Service [cmdb_ci_service] , Relationship = Contains::contained by and Dependent class = Service [cmdb_ci_service], you are getting "Relationships not compliant with all relationship rules" results?

If so then, yes, there appear not to be a OOTB Suggested relationship for this (or the reverse - Base class = Service [cmdb_ci_service] Relationship = Contained by::contains and Dependent class = Service [cmdb_ci_service]). The existing records with Service on both sides are very old so it seems likely that the Suggested Relationship table has been updated with the actual classes (e.g. Offering > Contains > Dynamic CI Group) but hasn't been updated to reflect the fact that these lower classes inherit suggested rules from the parent service.

I guess all you can do is create an Idea in the Idea Portal to put it on ServiceNow's radar: https://support.servicenow.com/ideas

[Ingrid de Cerqu]

I already spent a lot of time trying to explain to Now Support why this is an issue.

I mean, if you are just implementing the platform as Out-Of-The-Box, following CSDM best practices, you shouldn't have to add these suggested relationship rules yourself in order to not get hundred of CMDB Health Tasks.

This should be fixed as a bug, not an enhancement.

I apologize for my frustration, but I really think that sometimes, the OOTB configurations of ServiceNow are just too poorly done, considering the high price we pay for the licenses.

I just thought that, being a high-end quality platform, these issues should be a no-brainer, meaning that Now Support should thank me for reporting it, instead of dismissing the issue like they did.

[Andreas Borell]

CSDM as a whole is an afterthought, not a design feature. 

Take the [incident.service] field for instance. Why is it not limited to active Technical Services / Business Services? Some things that would be so trivial to do in through a central effort from SN, but yet client after client has to go through the same motions, until SN decides that CSDM is no longer optional.

[Mathew Hillyard]

@Ingrid de Cerqu I understand your frustration. There are some gaps in support for CSDM, including missing coding support for traversing CSDM relationships, (impacted) Service Offerings on task forms are not calculated correctly OOTB, you are unable to see which Technical Service Offerings and Dynamic CI Groups a CI is a member of within both CI Relations Formatter and Dependency Views, to name but a few.

Hopefully these will be addressed as we move towards CSDM 5.0; in the meantime submitting an Idea will at least put it on ServiceNow's radar...