Deletion of De-Duplication tasks

[Siva Boppana1]

We have 30K de-duplication tasks. There are 5 years old records too in the list.

We started a CMDB clean up process and planning to delete all these tasks, So new de-duplication tasks will be created if there are any duplicates in the CMDB.

Is there any downside to consider before deleting these tasks.

[Sai Kumar B]

@Siva Boppana 

I would suggest you revamp your IRE rules to avoid duplicates in the future check this before deleting Duplicate tasks.

[DaveHertel]

Hi - Yes there is a downside of deleting the task if the root cause is still a problem / hasn't been addressed.   As Sai mentioned, the IRE rules should be evaluated.   If the IRE rules or the data sources haven't changed, then the duplicate tasks will likely reappear after being deleted... which isn't useful obviously.

To make the scope of dealing with +30K tasks, I'd recommend:

1) for tasks created/updated recently (year?), look for root cause.  The tasks state what the CLASS and Attribute criterion are that caused the duplicate.  If that problem hasn't been addressed, fix that root cause first. 

2) If IRE rules need/were adjusted, re-run whatever processes originated the dups to see if its truly fixed. 

3) Use the CMDB health dashboard, CI duplicates metric to watch over a time period/days/weeks if changes have made an health impact.

After assurance that proper tuning is successful, then deleting CI DUPLICATE tasks shouldn't be an issue.  Be aware where the root issue(s) haven't been addressed, dup tasks will be recreated when the health metric jobs run.

Hope this helps a bit?

[Afsar2]

Hi @DaveHertel ,

I have tried deleting the de-duplication task and would like to reproduce it.

I did run CMDB health job: Correctness. 

But the de-duplication task is not created. I do have duplicated CI's in CMDB and want to remediate them after reproducing de-duplication task.

Any suggestions will be helpful.

[DaveHertel]

Hi - I've seen cases where you have CI duplicates but the dup tasks are not created.  In this case you can create the duplicate tasks via script.  using the script, you provide 2 sysid's of the Ci's that are duplicated and the script creates the duplicate task which you can them use the duplicate remediator to resolve.  Yes, its kinda of a pain.. but the only way I've found to create DUP TASKS if the system doesnt' do it for you.  (don't know why it doesn't always created tasks... boo)

 Docs here

Hope this Helpful a little bit?