While entity type filters and entity class rules can automatically create entities and assign them to classes, what about the relationships between entities? How can we replicate CI relations between their corresponding entities? These questions came up in a recent training class.
One approach I took was to create a flow to look up dependencies in the CMDB and create relations between the corresponding entities in GRC. The flow is just a proof of concept and if you want to look at it, the update set is attached to this article, below.
Belasis has delivered and certified an App in the ServiceNow Store doing something similar, but not only for the CMDB relationships, but as well for the Organisation records (Companies, Business Units, Departments, etc...).
We tested the Flow Designer option, but we did not keep this approach as way too slow and performance impacting for the Instance. We have instead developed our app (Belasis - IRM/GRC Synchronisator) to have the lowest impact on the Instance and to allow several jobs to run for different classes of entities. For instance, you may want to run the synchronisation for the Server Class on a weekly basis on Saturday evening (huge number of relationships) and the one for Department Class every evening.
As well we use a 'crawling' approach so to ensure we bring the relationships in ONLY for those records that exist as Entities, so to avoid creating a bunch of new unwanted Entities.
Have a look at: https://store.servicenow.com/sn_appstore_store.do#!/store/application/60391ee7dbcbd410fe3de1c2ca96190c/1.0.0?referer=%2Fstore%2Fsearch%3Flistingtype%3Dallintegrations%25253Bancillary_app%25253Bcertified_apps%25253Bcontent%25253Bindustry_solution%25253Boem%25253Butility%26q%3Dbelasis&sl=sh
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience, Eric, very interesting. The fact that this app exists indicates that the need for replicating relations from the CMDB is quite large, something I was not previously aware of. Again, thanks a lot for sharing!
