application CI in DSC is having Install status absent and Operational status is Operational

[AjaiK]

an application CI in Discovery is having Install status is absent and Operational status is Operational, it seems unusual, what are the steps can be taken to remediate that?

[Christopher Hub]

Install Status gets set to "installed" when Discovery first finds an application.  If, subsequently, Discovery no longer finds the indicators for that application CI, it will flip to install status to "absent."  There are no state model synchronizations between install_status and operational_status in this regard, so it's not unusual for them to drift. 

Ultimately, you'll want to have a governance control that observes absent applications. Start with identifying only your key managed applications vs trying to get everything.  Using principal classes is an option here, but you may or may not want to do that if you use principal classes as reference qualifiers.  Either way - identify your target applications, then report on those in absent state.

You want to consider your software asset and server lifecycle processes in mitigating the findings on that report.  Ideally you want your asset handling process to drive lifecycles proactively.  If an app is retired from a server, then that action should update the CMDB.  As a backstop you can use Data Manager policies to automatically move "Absent" to "Retired" if you have the right process around it.

You do get state model alignment with CSDM Life Cycle Stage and Status, but there's a bit of an effort to get it in place for most environments that have many dependencies on existing legacy indicators.