CI Lifecycle Management - How To?

[stevejarman]

Hi - I'm hoping someone might be able to share some Best Practice information with me regarding CI Lifecycle Management, and specifically, how to correctly Retire CIs (mainly focusing on Servers).

I've found quite a few examples of people using scripts to set Retired operational status on CIs not discovered within a specific number of days (e.g. not discovered in 14 days? Set operational status = Retired). There's even an example of this by ServiceNow themselves within one of the CMDB training labs.

I've also found variations of that where they will also delete cmdb_rel_ci records where the parent or child is the CI that is being set to Retired.

And, I've also been reading up on the CI Lifecycle Management module within ServiceNow, but have been unable to find any documentation specific to the retirement process, so I'm not sure if this is the something this module handles or not.

I've written a fairly comprehensive script to handle retirement and also optionally delete relationships, but before I go ahead and implement something like this, I'd like to confirm 100% that this is the correct approach.

Can anyone who has proven/definitive knowledge on this subject please share your thoughts?

[doug_schulze]

Glad it can help. As to deleting the applications, that would absolutely depend on your local audit requirements but I have always looked at running processes as almost transient if they haven't been updated in 'x' amount of time. Thinking of someone spinning up an apache server for a test that gets caught in a discovery and disappears the next week. The apps used for your application services should always be updated and checking that they haven't been in less amount of time over a deletion is a good way to get the right folks' attention.  Also they don't really cost any money on the asset side, its all hardware and software so another reason I don't mind showing them the door...  But again, local policies will dictate... 

[boey007]

Hi Doug, I don't appear to be able to access the lab anymore - It may have expired. I don't suppose you have an alternative link to the documentation associated with the lab

Regards,

[doug_schulze]

Hang tight, I'm about to release v2.0 of the lifecycle framework

[boey007]

Great News Doug. Please share when this is available. Be happy to do some beta test and feedback if that helps too.

[doug_schulze]

Here you go