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]

On one of the cmdb_ci extension tables there's a field called "Operational Status" that lets you know whether the CI is currently in use.

[joshua_addingto]

Joe,

        We use a choice list (drop down) for Life Cycle Phase on all CIs in our CMDB, and it is manually set at the moment. It allows us to run some valuable reports when it is accurate. When used in conjunction with the "Most Recent Discovery" date and a decent Change Management practice we can keep it in check. We define a CI Record Owner for our different CI classes and make them responsible for the accuracy of their records. Couple that with Data Certification and you are in good shape.  

Current options include the following to reflect the standard life cycle of a CI:

Staging

Production

Being Decommissioned

Retired

We also include Lab, Test, and Disaster Recovery as options to further enhance reporting capability. These are usually outside of the normal life cycle, so a Lab server might remain in Lab until it is taken down as opposed to being staged, decommissioned, etc.

We set Life Cycle Phase as a mandatory field on certain valuable CI classes like Servers, and we ignore it on less valuable classes. It would be easy to set a business rule to automate based on discovery results, but as stated elsewhere in this thread being missed by discovery does not necessarily mean it is disconnected!

- Josh

[Jammoman]

Hi Guy,

Thank you for the response, that was exactly what I was looking for.

Joe

[NeilH2]

Hi Joe

CI's are meant to be overwritten and deleted by discovery on a regular basis.

If your worried about losing asset data, then you need to use the Asset Management application which serves this purpose.

Neil

[SandySeegers]

We have manual process in place that include instructions to change the status of a device to 'Retired' when removing them from the environment.   But any manual process isn't fool-proof and sometimes devices go awol from the wire for other reasons than decomission.

We have some aging logic implemented in a daily scheduled job.   Any CIs not updated by a 'heartbeat' type discovery are flagged (we change the status to 'Unknown').   Once you're able to flag them you can report on them and research them.