CMDB Health Inclusion Rule Best Practices

[Larry Youngqui2]

I am in the process of developing the CMDB Dashboard with the associated health rules.   The first iteration will be aimed at the Asset Management set of 'Managed Classes'.   Those CMDB classes that they actively manage and are responsible for.

Our CMDB contains a lot of what we consider "non-managed" classes, such as the Next Hop Routing records and other CI classes.   We have chosen to keep those in the CMDB but wish to exclude them from the CMDB dashboard.   And as we upgrade to Kingston, we want to take advantage of the Health Inclusion rule introduced in Jakarta.

But before beginning a large effort at configuring the rules, I'd like to ask for any best practices or advice that we should be aware of.  The documentation (Create identification inclusion rule) is clear on how to provision the necessary filters, but I want to ensure we're doing it in the most efficient manner.   And importantly, in a manner that is manageable and understandable by both myself and our Managed Class Owners.  Because the Asset Management set of Managed Classes is somewhat lengthy and messy, I'm starting with their set of classes first.  As I create the filters, I don't want to create such a fragile filter that it requires constant tweaking and fiddling.   I also want to avoid the question from my Managed Class Owners, as to "why" or "why not" any particular class is included or not.    They should have a clear understanding of what CIs they own and manage.  And if they need to adjust, they need to clearly provide the detail needed for the filter

At the top of the hierarchy, the cmdb_ci table, I plan on excluding the majority of classes that we just don't want incorporated in the scorecard calculations.   Especially, the classes that have large numbers of records, such as the aforementioned Next Hop Routing Rule.    The active record filter is a simple "Class != <class>" and so forth.    Basically, the global exclusion rule.

Under each specific managed class, I would include an inclusion of which specific records to include.  That is, "Active = True", or "Status = [Installed | Available | Deployed | etc.]" or "Managed by != NULL", etc.   Whatever the Managed Class Owner considers as an active CI record that needs to be managed.

Is this a feasible strategy to follow for building the set of CMDB CI records contained in our dashboard?   Are there other methods that have been used and tested?     Is there performance concerns that need to be considered when running the dashboard scripts?

Thanks in advance,

Larry

[Paul Coste2]

Definitely helpful.  Hoping to navigate this very quickly and get something in place in Production in the next week, so I appreciate the detail.

[Ronak3]

Hello Todd,

I am new to Health dashboard setup and i was wondering to know what is the use of "Health inclusion rule". I tried to look at the docs but no information regarding this option. Could you please let me know what is this options and how we can use this please. Thank you!

[Andrew Albury-D]

Hi KP04,

The Health Inclusion Rules are used to include or exclude CIs (based on a filter) from being included in the Health Metric calculations. For example, if you include "Operational Status = Operational" in the rules, only CIs which are flagged as Operational will be calculated in your health. This means you can include or exclude certain types of CIs, or CIs in your Development environment etc. 

In our organisation we have a large number of rules checking against different CI Classes (we only want to check types such as Windows Servers, Network gear etc), Operational Status, and Environment.

I hope this helps!

[Ronak3]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you! Your inputs were helpful for me to know how it works and i was able to setup a rule based on my requirement. However i have few questions, 

1. How to remove a metric from monitoring? For example, i do not want to see the orphan scorecard on dashboard as not required for us for now. So how do i remove it? 

2.  I see that we can only apply inclusion rule for each metric only once. So how can i exclude more than one CI in a metric ? (ex. for Recommended) Do we need to include "OR" condition inside the rule?

3. What all can we do in CMDB health dashboard? Is it only about those metrics to monitor or anything else?

[Andrew Albury-D]

1. How to remove a metric from monitoring? 

I don't believe you can completely "remove" a metric, but you could easily create a new dashboard that doesn't include that particular metric, and disable the scheduled job which collects it. 

2.  I see that we can only apply inclusion rule for each metric only once.

Yes, we have a large number of "OR" conditions inside the metrics which we configure. 

3. What all can we do in CMDB health dashboard? Is it only about those metrics to monitor or anything else?

One of the most useful parts of CMDB Health is the ability to generate tasks if CIs don't meet your requirements, and run remediation workflows against these tasks. The example we use is when a duplicate CI is found, if they are of a certain type we delete the older duplicate and keep the newest discovered version. You can also assign tasks to certain teams (e.g. Operations, or the Owner of the CI) to update information based on your requirements. 

I referenced This article pretty heavily.

Again, hope this helps!