Keeping Retired CI's

[geeerard]

We sometimes repurpose servers within our environment, and would like to keep any CI's in our CMDB that go to a "retired" state. The issue we're having is that when discovery runs, it will overwrite a "retired" server's information and populate it with the new information. I'm wondering if we can make some somewhat simple changes in the discovery process to flag the identification section to create a brand new CI in cases where it matches an existing retired CI record. (I believe the identifier is what we need to update, please correct me if I'm mistaken)

In case it helps, I'm listing below the fields that were updated in the CI in question, along with the identifiers which we have active presently. (I apologize in advance if this is a duplicate question that's been asked before)

Fields Updated:

• Has issue
• Disk space (GB)
• Has issue
• Name
• Location
• Location
• IP Address
• Host name
• Fully qualified domain name
• Default Gateway
• Has issue

Active Identifiers

• WBEM Service
• ESX UUID
• Storage Server
• Serial Number Table & Class Name
• Serial Number & Class Name
• Name & Class Name
• Network
• Serial Number Table & Name

Thank you so much for anyone that can comment and/or help, I can't say enough good things about this awesome SN community.

(We're currently on Istanbul Patch 6 btw)

[Dave Mau]

Matthew,

I get your question but I don't quite understand why you'd want to keep the old data if the server is now in an "un-retired" state.   Is this more as a record of it's previous use? Could you explain this further?

-Dave

[geeerard]

Thanks for the quick reply Dave! We would like to keep existing retired servers in our system for reporting/historical purposes.

[Ian Ma1]

I'd imagine the first thing to do is identify what is unique about the server after it's being 're-purposed'

once you have that, it should be trivial to add it to which ever CI identifier so merging doesn't occur etc...

[andrewmccabe]

I copied each of the OOB identifiers to new names

I disabled the OOB Identifiers and enabled the custom identifiers

I modified each of the identifiers to not match retired records (and also deal with the fact that there were already duplicate records in the CMDB before Discovery)

Not as simple as you might like ... but effective