CMDB database view - need help connecting several CI tables and relationships in one report

[Mickey_Cegon]

We have a structure set up as follows in our CMDB, using relationships:

Business Service "consumes" Business Application

Business Application "contains" Application

Application "sends data to/receives data from" Application

Application "runs on" various infrastructure

What I need is a report that managers can run, against the various levels of relationships. They are asking for one view, that they can select to run against any of the objects. So, I want to see all my Business services, with the related Business applications and their applications. Or, I want to see all Business applications that are related to servers that have an application running on it that is flagged SOX/MAR. And, many more...I've attached what has been built in the CMDB Query Builder, but we can't use that to build reports and dashboards

Has anyone been successful at connecting the relationship table to several CI tables with different relationships? I've seen posts where there are 2 tables connected to the relationship, but never more than 2.

Mickey Cegon

[Mary Vanatta]

Mickey,

I have been pondering your situation.  So I am going to try and break this down.  I consult with many different types of organizations. 



First, are you aware of the Common Service Data Model (CSDM)? 

Secondly, Service Mapping will create the relationship from the Service to the CI - is this something in your road map in the future? 

For extensive reporting on Business Application the Application Portfolio Management application is highly recommended for reporting. 


The area of concern for the Business or Application Service level mapping to the CI is - Is the "service" up and running(no outage) and SLA's  (IT area of concern)  Technical Services are used by Event Management. 

The area of concern for the Business Application table is "when do we need to replace", "end of life" - (Business area of concern)

One should never map anything on the Business Application table [cmdb_ci_business_app] table directly to a infrastructure CI.  I see that you are using alot of custom tables? 

Have you considered using the "Depends on" on relationship? 

My concern for your approach is you are doing a LOT of manual mapping, this takes a lot of time, resources and upkeep and yet still have to figure out reporting.   When using a manual mapping, someone has to remove the retired server, manually add a new server.  Are you doing this now?  


Service Mapping is a top down discovery of the Business Service and related infrastructure CIs.  Once put in place it will create/make those relationships automatically updated.

Not sure your organization is going down the right path, hence the issues you are having with reporting. 

[Mickey_Cegon]

Thanks for the feedback. We are not going to be looking at Service Mapping for probably years, and the need was there to map our custom applications (not ServiceNow custom apps) and services into the CMDB, so this is what we have. We are using the mapping to allow our Architects to see the structure of our custom applications via the relationships we have set up, and it's working perfectly for our needs, with the exception of the ability to report. We love the dependency views, which is the main reason we set up the relationships. We don't use Event Management, or Application Portfolio Management. We have a catalog item that decoms servers via request, and it changes the status of the server to retired at the end of the decom process. We have service requests set up to do the mapping work in the back end without manual steps, including setting up relationships, and removing them.

I'm not aware of CSDM, but if it means having to restructure how we set up our CIs, I'm not sure I'd be able to sell it. We just did a massive zBoot, because we have been on the platform since 2011, so at the time of the zBoot, we asked for advice on how to restructure our CMDB without Service Mapping, etc. After many hours of discussion, we set it up the way it worked best for our organization. We truly have our relationships right where we need them, but we just would like a good way to report. If we need to break the reports into several different views, we will, but we are interested in knowing if there is a way to set up database views to use all our tables in one view with relationships.

If we can't utilize one view, we will go with an interactive dashboard of some kind.

Thanks!

Mickey Cegon

[Mary Vanatta]

Here is the CSDM model from K19.  It is all just informational.   APM provides the best reporting with the dashboards.