IntegrationHub ETL (IH ETL) is a powerful ServiceNow-developed free app that provides easy to use, intuitive UI for importing the data from different Data Sources into CMDB tables.
Though the application is quick to start with, there are some important nuances to keep in mind. One of these is the way to define the field mappings and the criteria to perform insert/update operation. This is called "Coalesce" in the Transform Maps world and the "Source Native Key" in IH ETL.
Once importing the data by IH ETL into multiple CMDB tables, I faced the case, when my CIs were getting "disappeared" after the initial insert and following by other imports. After looking into the audit log, I found these were re-classified by the imports, followed for the other CI tables. The actual problem was that for the different CI classes, we had the CIs with the same name, which has been taken care of by the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) as a re-classification task.
Now comes the point to keep in mind while setting up your IH ETL import. Critical here is to define the "Source Native Key" properly, to make sure it contains the unique value across all imports.
You can also leave this field empty in case you have a small count of imports with no relationships and further complexity. What however is recommended is to define the new field on Step 2 of configuring IH ETL import "Prepare source data for mapping" that will be unique. For example, you can use the concatenated values of "Name+Serial Number" for computer CIs.
Then you set this value as your "Source Native Key" ensuring no further re-classification happens. Additionally, you can set the "Source recency timestamp" (date/time) field that will help in the "insert/update" scenarios and be used as a fallback to resolve conflicting attributes.
Hope this post helps to let you utilize the whole IH ETL tool potential and arrange the smooth and stable CMDB data integration in your environment.
