Finding missing and/or incorrect relationships within the CMDB is challenging as ServiceNow is not an OLAP reporting platform. The reporting/dashboards it has are great for 95% of operational requirements, but there are some things that slip between the cracks. How do you report on something that doesn't exist?
The solution I came up with was to use the flexibility of service portal widgets to build a report that shows:
- Missing upstream/downstream relationships on operational CIs
- Operational CIs with non-operational relationships (either upstream or downstream)
One of the nice things about the service portal is you can use it INSIDE regular ServiceNow by simply including a generic (blank) portal without any additional navigation (to keep users from straying from regular ServiceNow itself). In this case, I've added a module called CMDB Relationship Health that opens a generic portal page with the report widget on it. This also means when the user navigates from the report to view a CI they're right back inside regular ServiceNow and able to carry on as usual.
The Missing Relationships report contains an operational CIs that don't meet the expected relationships...
In this version, this is manually set in the code, but later versions could easily move this to a field on the record. As it is, it is easy enough to add, remove, modify these required relationships within the widget code.
The function getServices takes the following arguments
- CMDB table name
- Required (potentially missing) relationships (Upstream, Downstream or Upstream & Downstream)
- Encoded query to be run on this particular table
So adding, changing, removing these lines allows for granular control over the contents of the report.
The Operational CIs with Non-Operational Relationships looks at all the existing relationships between CIs and detects if any CIs have either a parent or child that is non-operational (as such a mismatch shouldn't exist)
The service portal provides a means of customising ServiceNow WITHOUT breaking core functionality or potentially breaking future upgrades. It's modular nature means it has the flexibility and agility to deliver custom functionality without compromising the integrity of ServiceNow as a platform.
Have fun
