Populate support group from discovery

[Karthik37]

We are trying to populate support group field from ServiceNow discovery. We have a sheet with IP subnets, location, BU & support group. We need to populate location(I know that we can use location attribute in discovery schedule), BU(custom attribute in cmdb) & support group for all CIs created (or at least server class). What would be the best approach for this requirement? Perhaps a custom table with the info and a business rule before insert/update?

[nikhil_agr20]

In that case, you should use Business rule to populate those fields. For example, if server class is Windows Server then Support group should be xyz(as per your sheet). same for BU.

[robertgeen]

My suggestion for this would be if you know the information before hand and can set it at the schedule level then you could add a custom field to the schedule table to contain that information and then create a new pre/post processor to access the BU and Support Group of the schedule that is discovering it and set it on the hardware CIs. 

A business rule could be used for this but then if you ever need to update it for new ranges it requires an update set promotion thus if you do it at the schedule level it would actually become in your control. This will only work though if you know before hand what ranges get which information. Either way I would give it a thought as I've done this with company record before and it worked quite well (if your requirement is to set it on sub CIs as well then that's a bit more difficult but I would start with hardware entries first).

[Severin Launiau]

@Karthik: the business rules and pre/post processor mentioned above would work well in many scenarios. One thing though, the support groups may not have any control over managing these rules themselves. Also in some places, that support group just can't be determined by direct system attributes.

That's where a metadata source can be handy. Could be key values extracted from an active provider via REST API, git repository, inventory files from your configuration management tool like puppet, chef, ansible, etc. The good thing with that approach is that, in places where teams are reshuffled quite often, your group won't take the burden to update the rules: you can still let them deal with their own metadata repository; could be all self-service for them, without them to ever touch the CMDB in ServiceNow. Of course, that approach comes with some extra accountability: valid support group names, clean-up procedures etc.

Séverin