Has anyone built a CMDB without the use of Discovery?

[coleschlosser]

If you have, what are some of the issues that you've run into? Are all of your entries does manually, or are they imported? I'm looking at introducing CMDB to my organization, but Discovery may not be in the budget for this year. Would it better to wait for the budget to be right or to build a CMDB to get us started. Please keep in mind we are scheduled to deploy Change Management and Problem management this year. Any past experience or insight would be great.

[Andrew Westerv4 · Accepted solution]

Discovery is not a requirement to make use of the CMDB, but it is one of the best ways to do so. Manual entry is tedious and quickly becomes stale or forgotten without leveraging other parts of the platform like regular Data Certification schedules.

I highly suggest leveraging existing management systems in your environment to populate your CMDB. Many vendors have existing integrations that you can find on the ServiceNow Store that you can use. Another suggestion is enabling the SCCM integration (even if you don't have it) to use as a "blueprint" to start your own custom integration. At the very least, you could use Active Directory to pull in computer objects into the CMDB.

[cyked]

Develop a distributed CMDB management model - each team responsible for managing things must maintain the CI records in CMDB.  Assign roles/responsibilities for the CIs (owned by, support group, etc.  Since you are deploying Change.  This will be a big touch point in maintaining the data in CMDB without discovery.  Teams should NOT be able to make changes if they cannot pick a valid CI for the change (if carrot on stick won't work, beat them with the stick instead).  Try to work things to ensure the owners are maintaining the CMDB as part of the change record, i.e. updating records when they are operational, updating records when they are retired, and so.  Develop metrics and dashboards to help teams manage things and point out when teams' are not doing their job.

[Mary Vanatta]

You might want to start with the high level Business Services, Business Applications and map those manually.  Then use SCCM to integrate to grab your computers/workstations.  

Have the network and server teams provide you a list of their equipment (servers, network gear)  import those.  

and per Andrew W above - this will get tedious.  So each team will need to keep their devices updated in the CMDB just like they did their spreadsheets or assign someone to be the CI Manager. 

Read up on the CSDM whitepaper that was recently published. 

[DaveHertel]

I agree with what Andrew and Mary already said -- plus would add:  Definitely, definitely, definitely don't bother with "manually maintained" CMDB.  i.e. relying on many people / groups / teams to maintain it.  Why?  Because they won't do it, at least not consistently across the organization.  While some folks might manually update some CIs, in the long run it will become STALE.   When CI data is stale it is quickly distrusted.  When its not a trusted source it becomes low-value to the business.   Not to mention the resources needed to train teams to maintain the data AND get them to care about it or be accountable for data integrity.

Unless someone is going to maintain an iron fist to ensure CI's are routinely maintained, audited for some kind of accuracy and most importantly TRUSTED, its a losing battle to have a manually-owned CMDB.   My 2.5 cents.   Use automation to its maximum benefit...

Hope this helps?