Putting Dynamic CI Group CIs into Maintenance

[David Carlin]

Hello,

We recently upgraded to Paris and are now starting to use Dynamic CI Groups. We are grouping together CIs that would need to go into maintenance at the same time for changes (I.E. Division ESX servers). In the past we were using Technical Services and when a user selected a Technical Service on the change request it would automatically add all the CIs from the Technical Service to the affected CI list. This was done with a business rule. We then created a maintenance rule to also put affected CIs into maintenance.

I am wondering if there is a better way to do this. If I put the Dynamic CI Group into the Configuration Item field on a change, will all the CIs that fall under that group go into maintenance as well? If not what is the best way to do this? I know on ServiceNow's website they mention adding them manually to the affected CIs list.

I guess my question here is: If I put a Dynamic CI Group in the CI field of a change, will every CI in that group go into Maintenance during the change window or do they need to be added to the affected CIs list manually?

Thanks,

David

[CasperJT · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

I would recommend you visit the Manage Technical Services domain (servicenow.com) page.

Here you will find some information regarding the Dynamic CI group (including use cases). One of the use case has a recommend for you.

As a way to manage patches for your CIs

In Change Management, you can select the Dynamic CI group for the CIs you need to update and use a business rule to auto populate the Affected CI field.

I guess the business rule has to be added (at least I haven't see it anywhere. I may be that it is in one of the gifts on the CSDM - Common Service Data Model - ServiceNow Community

Hope this helps. All the best,

Casper

[David Carlin]

Thank you Casper!

This was an excellent find and really helped me get on the right direction. I was able to leverage what I found here: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=28419769db60a010fb115583ca9619f8&view_source=searchResult to build my business rule.

Thanks,

David

[Jim Zeigler1]

I believe the OOTB "Maintenance Schedule" is what you are looking for. Similar to Dynamic CI groups, you can specify the class and a filter. If using a standard filter becomes cumbersome, you could add a "Patch Group" attribute to the Server table or use the tags attribute to identify the CIs you want the Maintenance schedule to apply to and look for that patch group using the filter.