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

[Curtis2]

Why are you even mentioning Virtual Servers and Asset in the same breath?

Virtual Servers should not be assets and so should not be tied to the Asset Lifecycle except cursorily for end of life & data retention requirements, which should be documented within your Configuration Management Life-cycle anyway.

That said, if we set the Asset question aside, you will have somewhere a request to retire a virtual server.  Once you have done due diligence for SOx, SOC, etc the virtual server in the virtualization platform can be spun down or deleted.  If you have an integration between this platform and servicenow, this could easily be orchestrated as part of the request to retire.  With this integration and orchestration, once the virtual device is turned off and deleted, this updates the Virtual Machine Instance which cascades to the server CI.  The only think you'd need to be sure of is the retiring of dependent CIs (DNS, Installed Software, etc) which for the most part, should be OOTB.