Delete or deactivate Configuration items?

[mitzaka]

Hi SNC,

For those who are not yet drowning in Christmas celebrations:)

A question which has been commented in some posts here, but has no clear answer, so I decided to gather some opinions here.

We are in the state where we want to clean up our CMDB a little - it's very complex at the moment as it contains all kinds of CI classes, from business services, through networking stuff all the way to VMware vCenter things from Discovery. The idea is to start over simple and begin with just a list of need-to-have CI classes, and then build up on this and add more classes as we go.

We obviously have two options:

A. to delete all unnecessary CIs
B. to deactivate all unnecessary CIs

However, we need to be very careful because our CMDB has been used for quite a lot time and there are many incidents, tasks, and other records which are related to those CIs. I know the advantages and disadvantages will be something like:

• Keep the now-gone CMDB item in the database, but mark it as non-operational. This approach has the advantage of keeping intact any links you have from incidents, tickets, etc. to the now-gone CMDB item, thus keeping all your history and details available for investigations or reports. Because these items are still in your CMDB, it likely means that you'll want to filter out the non-operational items for certain kinds of reports, and views on-screen. For example, you might modify the Configuration -> Computers module to include such a filter (you can always remove it if you want to peruse the non-operational computers).
• Delete the now-gone CMDB item from the database. This approach has the advantage of simplicity — you delete the item, and it disappears immediately from all lists and reports. Simple! But the downside is that now any incidents, tasks, etc. that referenced this CMDB item lose their references, which destroys a little bit of your history.

Also I am afraid not to hit this problem:

For example, I ran this against VMware Virtual Machine Instance [cmdb_ci_vmware_instance] and it did delete everything in that table. However, this tables extends Virtual Machine Instance [cmdb_ci_vm_instance], which extends Virtual Machine Object [cmdb_ci_vm_object], which extends Configuration Item Base [cmdb_ci]. Every single one of those tables will have a record "orphaned" for each of the records you deleted in your extended table. This becomes a problem if you are doing a global search for all CIs against the Configuration Item Base table, let's say for a device named "WinPC1234", you can get back multiple records for one CI, but when you click on the "orphaned" records, it tries to open the record in the VMware Virtual Machine Instance table, and you get a nice "No Record Found" error.

So from your experience, could you share some thoughts on what would be a good safe and effective approach here.

Also, I do have three instances to play with - Dev, Test and Prod, so I am willing to try stuff.

Thanks in advance!

[Kalaiarasan Pus]

Deactivating the CI's is the best approach per me because like you said deletion will result in orphaned records in the entire system which is pretty hard to clean up and you can't really be hundred percent sure that you have cleaned up everything ....

[hima6]

Hi

Make active=false for those CI where no longer required.

Regards,

Hima Pallela.

[newbiedeveloper]

is ther active field onCI?

[Slava Savitsky]

Out-of-box there isn't but you could easily add one or use a certain Status for the same purpose.