Handling old discovered data

[munwong]

Dear fellow Discovery gurus:

How do you handle old discovered data? For example: When I run discovery last week, it was able to create and update 10 CIs. This week, when I run discovery again, some of the components may no longer be there (one of the software installed removed), the relevant components were discovered and have the most recent discovered date and timestamp. The ones that are no longer there isn't updated and have the most recent discovered date as last week. How should we deal with those data? Do you have scripts or reports to flag them and work with teams to update the CI status?

[MrMuhammad]

Hi,

We have 60 days discovery threshold for CIs. If a CI doesn't get discovered/updated in the last 60 days a request gets generated with couple of approvals and task. Once the request gets approved we flip the operational status of that CI to retired.  

We also have report in place that shows list of CI which are not updated in the last 2 months. 

Thanks,

Sharjeel

[munwong]

Hello Muhammad, how do you clean up relationships associated to the stale (or potentially retired) CI?

[Daniel Borkowi1]

Hi,

I would also recommend to use the staleness metric from the health dashboard. If you have infraststructure CIs which was last update 30 days ago, you can set it to retired or absent. Use the report for manual update or create a Scheduled Job/UI Action for this use case. Never delete such data because there could be a important history like incident, changes ... referencing to it. For applications which wasn't discovered within last month or last two weeks (depending on you staleness threshold which you can define per each class in CI Class Manager) you could delete if no process is using this data as reference (mostly not the case). 

By the way in the Discovery Fundamentals training we recommend to utilize Scheduled jobs for such use cases. Check every day all Hardware CIs where most recent discovery is older than 30 days, set state to absent or retired. 

Hope that helps.

Greets Daniel.

[Ashutosh Munot1 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Fantastic Question:

What we do i will share that :

1) We have a retirement process in place using flow designer which will check most recent discovery for Servers,Web Servers, Application,etc and mark them retire if the device was not discovered in last 30 days or 60 days.

Check this: Flow Designer : Mark servers retired if not discovered in 90 days

2) We never delete the history of the CMDB CI as it gives you proper utilization and usage details for software and applications as they are used by SAM pro.

3) Software discovery using SAM Pro has a nice feature to mark devices complaint and non complaint along with helping you to optimize the data by using removal activity. Which you can check here:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-software-asset-management/page/product/software-asset-mana...

Please feel free to ask your questions.

Thanks,
Ashutosh