Exclude Discovery items from clone

[rgu]

Multiple departments in our company make use of the same ServiceNow instance. One of those departments wants to clone down from the production instance to the QA and DEV instances. My team owns the Discovery and Configuration/CMDB modules. We want to prevent the cloning from overwriting/touching any Discovery or Configuration/CMDB information.

1. To prevent Discovery and Configuration/CMDB items from being overwritten in a clone, would the proper steps be to add cmdb*, discovery*, and ecc* to the Clone Exclude Tables section?
2. Are there other tables that should be excluded, or other data preservers that should be added, to meet that goal?
3. Would there be negative effects on other modules/applications in the instance with those exclusions? Someone voiced concern because there are 779 tables that begin with CMDB. Are all tables that begin with CMDB truly only used for the Configuration application?

[Daniel Draes]

1) If you don't want the data to be cloned the exclude tables is your choice. Bear in mind, only excluding would result in empty tables after the clone.

2) Data Preservers is what you would need to make sure the data in the tables will stay. So use Exclude Tables and Data Preservers in combination.

3) yes, all tables starting with cmdb_ are used only as part of the CMDB. However, all referential fields would loose their information. Say you have a change with 20 servers attached, after the clone this information would most likely be lost as the same servers will exists in your QA but have different sys_ids.

[rgu]

Thank you for the reply.

The necessity of Data Preservers is troublesome, though. With Exclude Tables, a wildcard can be used. With Data Preservers, it appears an entry must be created for each individual table. There are 932 tables that start with Discovery, ECC, or CMDB.

[G24]

@rgu So what was the solution you ended up using / finding?  Thanks. 

[Jessica Hall]

@rgu  What solution did you end up using? I'm having a similar issue with keeping our Dev instance Discovery data during a Clone.