Process of decommissioning an Asset/CI

[tomjuk26]

Hi ServiceNow Community,

I am interested to know how users of Assets/CIs in ServiceNow handle the decommissioning process, particularly for virtual servers.

We use ServiceNow discovery and also the VMWare discovery. For every virtual server, we have a CI record for:

• Windows Server
• VMware Virtual Machine Instance
• DNS Name

When we decommission an asset/CI it can be a bit time consuming, where we mark the asset's status as Retired, which then flows to the CI's status to Retired as well. We then need to manually change any child CIs to Retired and then go to the VMWare Virtual Machine Instance CI and change its status too.

Has anyone managed to automate or speed up this process? I am curios to know how users handle this process.

Thanks

[Stefan K_]

If you can clearly define what related/linked CIs need to be also managed, I see no problem to create something automated with a flow designer. 

[tomjuk26]

Thanks for your reply @Stefan K. ,

So if I had an asset called 'server1' which is of Model Category 'Windows Server', and set its State to Retired. It would then change the linked CI's Status record to Retired as well.

Here is where I would need help with:

The CI would have potentially one or more child CIs listed in the following related links:

• Network Adapters
• Storage Devices
• File Systems
• CI IPs
• DNS Names for CIs
• Memory Modules
• Tracked Configuration files

[Stefan K_]

Hi, what help exactly do you require?

You have the automation rules quite far already:

1. Create a new flow that is triggered when windows server state changes to retired
2. The flow will then need to query the tables you listed above for records that are linking to the retired server and change their state too. 

Of course you need to:
- Know how to build a flow
- See in detail how the link to your server CI is made so you know to configure your flow to look up the linked records correctly
- Be detailed in your automation, I don't know if say network adapter could be used by multiple servers (not just by the one that is retired) so that you don't retire such records.

[tomjuk26]

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for your reply. I am a bit new to Flows in ServiceNow.

Using a quick example, how could I use the flow to query the related tables of a retired server?

Thanks