CI Criticality Framework

[michaelryba]

I am looking to put a framework, or at least suggestions, around the Criticality of a Configuration Item. We currently use values such as Business Critical, High, Medium, Low, etc. for the criticality of a CI but there is no good documentation/framework as to how those values are derived. Is there a definition/matrix that someone has put together that can help our support teams determine and set the Criticality of a CI. Any documentation/diagrams that are germane to this process are appreciated. I am trying to give our users a 30,000 foot view of what the levels of criticality mean and how they area selected and set for each CI.

Thank you for your assistance.

[jasonkist]

Did you ever get a response(not on this thread obviously)? We are in a similar situation. We are building out a new implementation of SNow and I am being asked to add a flag, critical ci, on the cmdb_ci table but I don't think that's system best practice.

[Lord Omicron]

Piggy backing on your question, Jason. Did you resolve your issue? How? I agree that add that field on the cmdb_ci table is not best practice. Criticality is usually based on the relationship to a Business Service. Absent that service, however, I am not sure how to set it without adding the field. I'm curious as to your solution. Thanks.

[jasonkist]

We heard from SN that the best practice is to use the criticality field on the applications (dropdown?) and use that relationship to identify the critical CIs (defined by SN as all CIs that support a critical application).  Someone objected to that, stating that the company would have CIs which would need to be identified as "critical" independent of the app / apps that they support. Not %100 what to think of that, I've moved onto a different role since my original post.

Last year, we did create a u_critical_ci Boolean on the CMDB_ci table as a test to help understand what we wanted. It did get implemented to PROD and we are using it as a related field to our custom applications table to flag business critical apps. We are moving away from this custom table to the OOB applications table. I hope this helps paint a picture to solve your own individual challenge.

[Lord Omicron]

Yes, it is essentially what I will be doing except I will use Business Service instead of Applications.