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.

[Ed Laar]

Hi,

I fully agree with your statements mate: No data is much better than untrustful data. I always recommend to start with a minimal set of data so start with the data that is needed for the high prio business requirements and prevent overload with data that can not be trusted.
Another statement I always use: If you do not want to invest in keeping data trustful over time simply do NOT start! As you already stated: It is not a matter of tools and automation: It's a matter of awareness and incorporating data topics in the day2day operations.

By the way: This is not only regarding what we call the 'traditional' CMDB but is reflects to ALL data in any system we rely on.

Cheers,

Ed