OOB CMDB Health Dashboard (Correctness, Compliance, and Completeness)

[Batman3]

What are some changes you made to the CMDB Health Dashboard in regards to Correctness, Compliance, and Completeness metrics?

Did you automate any tasks associated against any particular CI classes?

Did you implement any business rules based on any of the metrics?

What sort of metrics are you looking at in regards to compliance?

How do you deal with your instances duplicates?

How do you deal with orphans and stale CIs?

[christianmalone]

OK Batman. Commissioner Gordon calling...

I always suggest using either inclusion rules or the classes you set health rules on to manage which classes fall within scope. Rather then have a staleness rule set for 60 days at the CMDB_CI level which is unlikely to ever be healthy - I'll push that down to hardware then use inclusion rule to filter in just a few classes. 

I tend not to use Required/Requested fields as neither take into account CI lifecycle and Completeness tasks can only be hardset to one group.

Instead I leverage Compliance more often and set my filters/templates/audits so for example it audits just a few key classes where their status = In Use and the owner_group (user made field referenced to sys_user_group) field is empty. The tasks for these need to hardcoded or don't assign and build assignment rules to assign based on class/best guess/lookup for who might be the owner. 

Once you have an owner then each compliance template after then includes Owner_group is NOT empty as well as those additional fields I want to audit. Now tasks can be assigned to the CI.Owner_group field since this audit doesn't trigger unless there is one. 

Orphans are bad deletes and stale is often a bad rule definition, broken schedules or lack of lifecycle retirement. 

Duplicates are often process failures and it's always better to focus on fixing the process rather then bandaid and just resolve duplicates. 

[Batman3]

This is exactly what I was looking for sir!

I'm a little said more people didn't join in on the fun 🙂

So as far as leveraging inclusion rules or health rules, I assume that is to designate which classes are part of the metrics for a given health score?

What sort of measures are you taking on your stale CI classes and what classes are you most concerned about?

as far as compliance goes, if I'm understanding correctly you are leveraging compliance audits to see if you have non-discoverable ownership information associated with certain CI classes? What classes and what resources do you use to collect this ownership information?