CSDM - Recipe for Success - Free eBook

[mikkojuola]

Hi CSDM Community!

I know many of you are working with CSDM. So are we. We discuss the topic almost daily with ServiceNow customers and partners. Therefore, we felt that we might have something to say about common pitfalls and success factors when aligning with the model.

So please, let me introduce our free eBook CSDM – The Recipe for Success we published earlier this week. (Disclaimer: You need to fill in contact details to download and may receive communications from us)

We hope this content is helpful to anyone working to align with CSDM (as we all should).

Best regards,
--Mikko

[VenniMakarainen]

Mikko, I think this great guidance as it emphasizes that technology in itsef is not the full answer. However, couple comments if I may?

page 17: If ServiceMapping is not available for cost-related or other reasons, you would need to also manually maintain relationships between "infrastructure CIs," like servers and applications, to an Application Service.

• I do not see this 100% accurate. E.g. Calculated Application Service (ie. Dynamic Service) reflects CI relationships automatically. A Dynamic CI group can be used for certain use cases like ‘servers in location x’ and does not require manually maintaining the app service CI ‘content’. Of course, the actual maintenance of CI relationships manually for infrastructure is to be avoided. Likely you are referring to CI relationship maintenance not app service maps.

General observations:

• though organisational attributes need to be manually maintained for many cases, automation can be enabled like synchronizing group attributes

• CMDB Query Builder can be used for more complex scenarios to enable audit type reporting for different data models. Available baseline examples and KPIs track things like 'Application Services Missing Business App Relation'. CMDB query builder is not limited to CI classes.

• CI Class Manager is powerful to govern CMDB overall including auditing of specific CI class compliance.

[mikkojuola]

Hi Venni,

Thanks for taking the time to read and comment on our eBook! You made some excellent points but let me comment on our thinking behind all this.

Dynamic CI Groups are great. I fully agree that they can help organizations connect CIs to Technical Service Offerings, or simply provide "similar CI" grouping for different purposes. However, I doubt you can cover all required CI relationships with Dynamic CI Groups.

For example, how does a Dynamic CI Group respond to questions like "what is the impact of this particular server on a specific business service", if servers are grouped by data center location, operating system, etc?

So, my point is that even with ServiceMapping, Discovery, and Dynamic CI Groups in use, you are likely to still need some extra help to validate and maintain CI relationships (and relationships and references to other than CMDB data) to support different use cases. Or validate that Service Offerings are connected to Dynamic CI Groups at least.

Synchronizing group attributes is also great for some use cases but, in my opinion, doesn't help much when figuring out support groups for applications and services.

CMDB Query builder and CI Class Manager are also great. In my opinion, it can be challenging to understand and utilize many different tools to get adequate control over data quality management and align with the CSDM. Also, the extra time needed to create reports and dashboards out of the different configurations to collect data quality and compliance-related KPIs adds to the challenge.

Best regards,

--Mikko

[PaulSylo]

Thanks, Mikko,

I have just started downloading this book. As i am just started learning on CSDM, i hope this will help me to better understand 

[mikkojuola]

Hi @PaulSylo,

Thanks for downloading. I hope you find it useful.

Since the release of this ebook, we have also published several articles about CSDM and data management on the Now Platform on our blog.

Cheers,

--Mikko