Has anyone built a CMDB without the use of Discovery?

coleschlosser · ‎03-11-2019

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 · ‎03-11-2019

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.

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robertgeen · ‎03-12-2019

Many people get stuck on the idea of a CMDB having to come from Discovery and often overlook trusted sources that are already in place. Dave, Andrew, and Mary gave some great feedback here but what I would add to this is to always take a step back and look at what your trusted sources of data in your organization are. Often Managed Data repositories (MDRs) exist and they largely make up trusted data sources that can be integrated with to provide data to your enterprise CMDB. In the end data is data as long as it has a process wrapped around it to keep it up to date.

The one bit of advice I'll give you from my experience is stay away from a process to manually map business service to infrastructure relationships as in my 10 years experience I am yet to see it work anywhere outside of fairly small organizations. Either way I think you have what you need here.

cyked · ‎03-17-2019

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.

There are other ways to automate (integrations), but do not get stuck managing other people's data.

Rodel · ‎10-25-2019

Hey coleschlosser,

Have you had any luck introducing the CMDB without Discovery or Service Mapping? Can you share your experience?

coleschlosser · ‎02-07-2020

I have not had any luck to this point. We are still researching potential solutions. There might be other options but at this point I think Discovery is the best option if it is in the budget.

Damhoej · ‎09-09-2020

I am rebuilding the CMDB in our company right now. We have moved to a new instance when we merged with other countries 😉

I do not use CMDB but I have had all the servers and switches in the enviroment pulled and entered in a CMDB staging database. From that database i build datasources that I can import and proces in transform maps.
If done like that you stil have to map and enter the services and so manually, but it will help you a lot if you "automate" the CIs that changes regulary.

Remember to build hardware CIs with a hardware model and an asset first.