Discovery and decommissioned Ci's

[Jammoman]

If a discovered Object is decommissioned and longer configured on the network, Will it remain in the CMDB?   I have been given the Job of keeping the CMDB health and accurate.

Thank you for your support

Joe

[guy_yedwab]

Discovery will not automatically remove objects from the CMDB if they no longer are found in Discovery. The reason is, as you probably know, there could be many reasons that the CI doesn't show up in a scan -- a change in credentials, the CI is not networked properly, or it's decommissioned.

Every time Discovery is run, it updates the "Last Discovered" date with the current date/time. If a device is no longer being discovered, that date will no longer be updated.

I'd recommend running a report or generating a task automatically when that date is more than, say, a week or a month out (depending on how often you run Discovery). Then you can validate whether the CI is decommissioned, or whether there's a technical issue preventing it from being discovered.

[TSP666]

Guy,

So do you recommend to delete the CI's based on the report ?

e.g. those CI's not detected for more than x weeks / months, delete from the CMDB

Tony

[joshua_addingto · Accepted solution]

As part of our CMDB/Discovery practice, we only delete duplicate CIs (created manually on accident or mistakenly by Discovery). When a device is removed or decommissioned we mark it as such in the CMDB and maintain it as a permanent record. This allows us to have a complete prior-state history and all of the connections from related Change/Incident records.

- Josh

[Jammoman]

Hi Joshua,

Great response,   Keeping the prior state history and the link to incident mgmt is very important. How would I go about marking the decommissioned object in the CMDB? One option would be to manually place a note in the record?

Joe