What is best practice for resolving duplicate ci's?

[Teri Bobst]

Hello ServiceNow Community!

I need to create policies & procedures for reconciling duplicate CI's and need some guidance from what others are doing to handle this situations. We are utilizing the CMDB Health functionality within Geneva, but we do not have Orchestration to automate any of the reconciliation tasks.

My question - when a duplicate CI is found, is it best practice to just delete the duplicate, or would some other method of reconciliation, such as renaming the dup, changing state to duplicate, etc - be better?

I know a lot of the time, the duplicate value has been used as the CI on Changes, Tasks, Incidents, etc and deleting then replaces the value with the sys_id string which is a problem. I am able, under my admin account, to update the CI on these records to prevent that issue - but I am still very reluctant to just start deleting records.

Any information on how others are handling this would be great!

Thanks in advance.

Teri

IT Asset Manager

Client Configuration Manager

Service Catalog Owner

CMDB Owner

Part-time ServiceNow developer

[SanjivMeher]

I usually delete the CI and map the records to the right CI.

Another option is to add a state Duplicate on the CI Record. Everything marked duplicate can be unlinked. And later deleted after review. I dont have a best practice, but that would be a good way to deal with it.

[glennpinto]

In London, on a de-duplication task record, there is now a Remediate wizard that easily allows you to merge data from duplicates to a master CI or delete duplicates, if it has no related items or tasks associated with it. 

[Sandeep Joshi]

u r right!