CMDB Health: The Foundation of Every Great ServiceNow Implementation

[sgrison]

In every mature ServiceNow environment I’ve worked with, one truth always holds: if your CMDB is unhealthy, nothing else works as intended. ITSM, ITOM, AIOps, even cost reporting — all of it depends on reliable configuration data. Yet many organizations treat the CMDB as a one-time project instead of a living system that needs care.
Healthy CMDBs don’t happen by chance — they’re built on process ownership, automation, and accountability. Discovery and integrations can populate data, but people keep it relevant. I’ve seen clean CMDBs decay within months when no one owns the lifecycle of their CIs.

Best practices I recommend:
• Assign ownership — every CI class should have a data steward.
• Automate where possible — use Discovery, Service Graph Connectors, and reconciliation rules to reduce manual entry.
• Measure what matters — track completeness, compliance, correctness, and duplicate rate.
• Review regularly — quarterly audits reveal data drift before it becomes technical debt.
• Keep it aligned to CSDM — structure enables meaning; services link the data to value.

A healthy CMDB isn’t about having more data — it’s about having the right data you can trust.