Tag Governance and Tag Application Question

[Tyler Compton]

For some background: Since we are now working on an overall SN Enhancement effort, we are looking into how tags can better assist our Service Mapping efforts. Selfishly, I am also interested in how using tags can better assist our operational teams' efforts with tagging and drawing relationships with multiple tables, as I am involved heavily in this area. Our Tag Governance module was installed today in Dev. Our users have been using tags privately in Prod in their own ways for a number of years.

I am running into quite a few issues in our Dev instance in trying to setup my own governance policies to show health and just general poking around to better understand how it works, and I am assuming many of these issues are PEBKAC, so that's why I am here.

I have created a tag and it is present in the Label table:

I have assigned this specific tag to a Computer in our CMDB:


When I run this Tag Count Policy (with Expected Tag Count == 1):


The device in question is returned in the population (it meets the Policy Criteria along with a number of other devices), but it fails the audit. I do not believe it should, as it has one tag (WoW) and I am checking that it has one or more tags.

I started at what I thought was a rudimentary level to get some footing and comfortability with tags and governance, but this obviously hasn't boosted my confidence. What am I doing wrong? I have had the same observations in our Windows Server table (server returned, but failed, even though I observed a tag), but I am less familiar with these, so I would like to gain familiarity in the Computer table first.

Thank you, in advance, for any input.

Apologies if the Topic(s) are incorrect for this post.



edit: Wanted to add a picture of the value in the Latest Policy Run Findings output:

[Ram Devanathan1]

Hi Tyler, great to know that you started using Tag Governance app. Please note the app uses the cmdb_key_value table to check tags. that's the de facto standard table where discovery stores the tags of the CMDB CIs.

i see what you have done here - maybe create a custom column - 'label' - that would not be taken into account. that's why you still find errors.

try adding the same tag key and value in cmdb_key_value table.

hope this helps.

Ram

[Tyler Compton]

Ram,

THANK YOU so very much for confirming my suspicions... shortly after I posted this question, I came across this page: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/rome-it-operations-management/page/product/event-management/task/alert-clustering-cis.html that referenced the table you are referring to (even though I am not necessarily interested in alert clustering through tags, it is the only page, out of the many I have viewed, that refers to where the correct tags are stored). I put in for access to add values to this table as I do not currently have access and it does not appear that any values are currently stored in that table.


Just so I can better understand our application of what we call "tags"... my organization has two tables that track the addition of tags (using the ellipses on an item such as an Incident, Requested Item, or Problem
😞




[label] stores the label title, [label_entry] tracks the item that has had a label applied. If I am inferring correctly from your statement, it sounds like these tables are either a deprecated function of ServiceNow or are not "out of box," and were built as a customization sometime after our adoption of ServiceNow. Does that sound correct to you?

Thank you again for your time and response!

-Tyler

[Ram Devanathan1]

hi Tyler thanks for looking in and responding quickly. The tags field in each table in servicenow is meant for more generic reasons, and it is a bit restricted by the fact that you can add only 1 tag, it need not even have a form of key, value.

for all tag related topics in the CMDB world, we rely on the cmdb_key_value table only. if you are using discovery (esp something like cloud discovery) this table would already have some entries. it is ok if it is empty, you can go ahead and add the entry for your tag in this table.

an even simpler option you have is - create a remediation action and run it - this will automatically set the tags in the cmdb_key_value table.

do not check Update Tags in Cloud in the remediation as this would not matter to you.

regards,

Ram