Reporting on retired services - past 7 days

[Mike Foreman]

I'm looking to add a widget to a dashboard that shows how many services have been retired in the past 7 days. I've tried a condition of operational_status = retired AND updated_on the past 7 days. But it feels like this is not accurate enough. I really don't want to have to add a new field for the date change if avoidable. Any ideas?

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

You are correct, because any update to the record will show when you use 'sys_updated_on'. However, your 'I really don't want to add....' will prevent you from reporting on this. The date/time of operational status is not tracked on the record (it is in the audit table, but absolutely don't ever report on that). 

If you have PA you can see if you can use that to collect the daily 'retired' ones, but it won't give you the exact ones that are retired. If your services are integrated from another system and the integration stops on retirement, you could use the last recovered date/time stamp, but not sure if you have that.

Then you are stuck with metrics. OOB you can't have metrics on non-task tables, but you can update the table reference qualifier to enable other tables as well. Then you can create your metric to be set when the status changes. You just need to add the metric event BR to the table to enable it.

Most simple way: create that field. If it is important enough to report on, it's is worth the limited work to create the field and update it on retirement.

[Mike Foreman]

Excellent advice and concise summary - thank you very much!

[Lisboa]

@Mark Manders - Any chance you have insights on how to collect the Retired Date value for records where that field is already set?  Assume it is some kind of trek through the sys_audit/sys_history tables to collect.

Working on a similar need to pull a report to show when servers where moved into a Retired state and struggling to find some straightforward approach.  To point, if I need to create  a new field to catch it going forward - easy enough.  The quandry is getting that field populated for all existing CIs where it's already occurred.

[Mark Manders]

If you haven't tracked it, you won't get it. Audit and History are not reliable because of how they work. Just accept that you will be reporting 'as of now', either through metrics or a new field.