New Feature: CI Consolidation...

[SlightlyLoony]

Many folks use Discovery as the sole means of populating their CMDB in Service-now. But if you're one of those who also imports items into your CMDB, or who manually enters CIs into your CMDB, CI Consolidation is for you. It can also help in situations where equipment is frequently repurposed, is given new IP addresses, or when you identify your equipment in some way differently than Discovery normally works.

Here are some scenarios where you might find CI Consolidation useful:

• Importing and Discovery: If you've imported CIs from another source (perhaps a legacy SMS dump, or an ongoing Solar Winds import), CI Consolidation will let you write simple rules to let Discovery know which imported CI is the same as a CI that Discovery found. You can use any field (or combination of fields) in both your imported CIs and your discovered CIs to identify the ones that should be the same. Once you've done so, you can write simple rules to tell CI Consolidation what to do (such as merge the discovered CI into the imported CI, combining all the data from both).
• Manual CI entry and Discovery: If you're manually entering CIs (perhaps as new equipment is received), CI Consolidation will let you write simple rules to identify which manually entered CIs are the same as the discovered CIs — exactly as in the preceding item.
• Non-standard device ID: You may have a means of identifying devices that Discovery doesn't know about, and you'd like to use it. For example, perhaps you use the manually configurable fields in your network gear to store unique identifying information. CI Consolidation will let you use these fields instead of the serial numbers and and network configurations that Discovery normally uses.
• IP Address changes: If you have devices whose IP addresses change frequently, but the device's purpose hasn't changed (such as workstations on DHCP with no lease renewals, only new leases), you can use CI Consolidation to adjust Discovery's behavior exactly to your liking. The challenge for Discovery in such a situation is that it can't tell whether the device just changed IP addresses, or if it's now serving a completely different purpose (with a differnet name, etc.). With CI Consolidation, you can tell Discovery exactly what to do.
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  Because CI Consolidation is documented on the Wiki, I won't lead you through an example here. Read the documentation; if it sounds like something you'd like to try, talk with your Service-now rep.
  
  This feature was initially released in the Summer 2008 Stable 3, and will be formally included in the Winter 2009 release...