Dynamic CI Groups and Change Conflicts

[Charlotte Pakes]

Hi,

We are looking at using Dynamic CI Groups and Maintenance Schedules to help management of Patching Change Requests (Patch Tuesday). 

We have 2 requirements related to this:

The patching team currently have to manually add all the affected CIs to their Change Requests. Using Dynamic CI Groups will make it much quicker for them to just add the Dynamic CI Group and have ServiceNow auto-populate the Affected CIs.

We would like to have a regular maintenance schedule recorded for patching, as we know when this will be happening every month. We want to avoid the scenario of users outside of the patching team scheduling other Change Requests for the same CIs during their regular patching window, even when the patching team haven't yet scheduled their Change Requests.

I am struggling to get this to work with Dynamic CI Groups.

I can create a Schedule and apply it to a Dynamic CI Group containing the relevant CIs.

When I create a Change Request with the Dynamic CI Group as the Configuration Item, the Conflict Checker picks up the relevant Maintenance Schedule and is correctly displaying a Conflict with the patching schedule. All the affected CIs are added successfully.

However, if I create a Change Request for an individual CI that is a member of that Dynamic CI Group, the Conflict is not picked up at all. ServiceNow adds the Dynamic CI Group as an Impacted CI/Service so it can see that the CI is a member of that group. 

Is there something I am missing? The documentation suggests this should work: Create blackout and maintenance schedules in Change Management (servicenow.com)

"You can select a dynamic CI group so that all the configuration items in that dynamic CI group will be taken into account for blackout and maintenance when conflict detection is run.

The dynamic CI group is seen as the parent CI to all the CIs that are within that group. If there are scheduling conflicts related to any of the CIs in the dynamic group, the conflict will be shown in the conflicts table of the dynamic CI group."

Has anyone else successfully configured this or something similar and can you advise how you did it?

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Charlotte Pakes 

Very interesting use case and will follow this.

May be you can check the conflicts properties , might be helpful.