Measuring Duplicate CI Reduction with Now Assist for CMDB – Best Practices?

[Snikhat]

Hi Community,

We are using Now Assist for CMDB to identify and remediate duplicate CIs and would like to measure its effectiveness and demonstrate business value to management.

I am looking for recommendations on the following:

1. How do you measure the number of duplicate CIs before and after remediation?
2. Which CMDB Health metrics or reports do you use to track duplicate reduction over time?
3. Do you report on:
   • Total duplicate CI count removed?
   • CMDB Correctness Score improvement?
   • Number of de-duplication tasks completed?
   • Reduction percentage month-over-month?
4. Are there any out-of-the-box dashboards or Performance Analytics indicators that help visualize duplicate CI trends?
5. How do you present the results to leadership or management to demonstrate the value of Now Assist and CMDB data quality improvements?  

   Example:

   • Duplicate CIs Before: 1,250
   • Duplicate CIs After: 320
   • Reduction: 74%
   • Correctness Score: 82% → 95%

   I would appreciate any examples of reports, dashboards, KPIs, or management scorecards that have worked well in your organization.

   Thanks in advance!

[pavani_paluri]

Hi @Snikhat ,

To measure the effectiveness of Now Assist for CMDB duplicate remediation, I would focus on a few key metrics:

Number of duplicate CI candidates identified.
Number of duplicate CI candidates resolved/merged.
Duplicate reduction percentage over time.
CMDB Health Correctness Score trend.
Duplicate candidates by CI class (Servers, Network Devices, Applications, etc.).

Example:

Before remediation: 1,250 duplicate candidates
After remediation: 320 duplicate candidates
Reduction: 74%

For reporting, I would recommend creating Performance Analytics indicators or scheduled reports that capture duplicate candidate counts weekly or monthly. This provides a clear trend showing whether the duplicate population is decreasing over time.

CMDB Health dashboards can also be useful, particularly when showing improvements in the Correctness metric. However, I would treat Correctness Score as a supporting KPI rather than the primary measure of duplicate reduction.

For leadership reporting, I typically present:

Duplicate candidates identified
Duplicate candidates resolved
Reduction percentage
Correctness Score trend
Top CI classes with the highest improvement

This tells a simple story:

Cleaner CMDB data
Fewer duplicate records
Higher trust in operational reporting and service mapping
Reduced manual effort required for CI management

If you are using Now Assist recommendations, you may also track the number of recommendations reviewed and implemented to demonstrate adoption of the capability.

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Kind Regards,

Pavani P