Configuration Items: Reporting (discovered) Changes

[conmic]

Hello all,

I have a little problem where I would like to know the best practice in order to achieve following request.

We have recently activated the Discovery plugin to track devices that belong to a certain customer.

The Discovery is working great, but now we need to send the customer a weekly report of the discovered changes that have occurred on the devices. Especially when it comes to the installed software.

I have read of Baselines, Data Certification, Compliance, Auditing, etc... but I don't seem to find (out of all these options) the best practice in order to achieve what I need.

Has somebody an idea where I should start or how I could realize this?

EDIT: I have found this question, but it's not really helping me: How to report on discovered Changes to a CI

Kind Regards,

Michel Conter

[DanLevin]

Hi Michel,

You may want to keep it simple here.

You could create a report off of the Configuration Item [cmdb_ci] table that shows CIs that have been "created by" or "updated by" Discovery within the past X days/weeks/hours. You could filter the results by "Class", or by "Administration Group", if you have that field populated for these CIs already. Once you've refined the report, you can schedule it to be sent to the corresponding group on whatever frequency you deem appropriate.

Here's a screen shot of my most basic "Discovery Results" report. I've changed the filters around to return "Windows Servers" that have been "Created By" or "Updated by" the account that runs our midserver within the past 5 days.

[conmic]

Hello Dan,

thank you for the reply, that's somewhat of helpful. But I'm also trying to get a compare of the installed software. The baseline functionality seems to go into the right direction, but I need reports....

[DanLevin]

Michel,

If you'd like to review the historical changes of CIs in the Installed Software class, you'll need to enable auditing on the cmdb_ci_spkg table, as it is not audited by default. You can do this by navigating to System Definition > Dictionary and seaching for the cmdb_ci_spkg table. Click the table in the list, and select the "Audit" checkbox.

Once auditing is enabled, you'll be able to see the following information for CIs on that table. Wiki - Turning on Auditing (History) for a Table - ServiceNow Wiki

• The Unique Record Identifier (sys_id) of the record that changed
• The field that changed
• The new field value
• The old field value
• The number of times this record and field have been updated
• The date and time when the change occurred
• The user who made the change
• The reason for the change (if any reason is associated with the change)
• The record's internal checkpoint ID (if the record has multiple versions)