Data Hygiene Dashboard

[Malaya]

Recently I have been working on data clean-up for the ServiceNow platform. I found it really useful so thought of sharing it here:

Problem Statement: Data within CMDB gets stale due to lack of maintenance process that ends up as loss of trust, issues with approvals etc..

Background: With ITOM subscription, we can have discovery enabled but that only takes care of the network assets. That is updated as per the schedule. Question becomes, how to keep people data up-to date when someone leaves the organization. Things like:

1. Software - Managed by
2. Software - Product Owner
3. Request Form - Owner
4. Assignment Group - Owner
5. Software Model - Managed By
6. Software Model - Product Owner
7. ...
8. ...

Solution: To address this question, I came up with Data Hygiene Dashboard which is collection of several reports:

• Inactive Product Owners (table: cmdb_ci_spkg)
• Inactive Managed by (table: cmdb_ci_spkg)
• Assignment Group: Inactive managed  (table: sys_user_group)
• Software model Inactive Managed by & PO (table: cmdb_software_product_model)
• Request form inactive owner (table: sc_cat_item)

as a filter dot walk to the user table for each .. user.active = false

this is identification of data.. now how to address it? For that I created scheduled trigger in FLOW designer to assign it to inactive users' Manager (who is an active user).. The FLOW triggers everyday before start of business and updates the data.

This has helped us with ensuring the communication and approvals are routing correctly.

I hope this helps !!

Please let me know if there are any questions.

Thanks,

Malaya

[Shruti08]

Hi,

Found it very interesting.

My question here is - 

are you applying only one filter here? and is it same for all use cases you mentioned?

And can you please provide detailed steps of the FLOW you have mentioned...

Thanks

Shruti Hegde

[Eeson]

Hey Malaya,

This is an area I've always felt could do with improvement OOB in ServiceNow, some generic flows to better manage data in ServiceNow in all areas not just the CMDB. Customers come up with their own solutions just like your example.

We do similar things in regards to CMDB,

1. Dashboarding for a tactical day to day view, our own + CMDB health dashboards
2. Process flow to mange the leaver process
3. Data certification to ask at a regular interval to the owner, validate and update their CI in scope.

Cheers!

[Malaya]

Hi Shruti,

No, this filter is in conjunction to what your organization already uses for active records..

For Example:

Inactive Product Owners, Filter that I am using is:

Product Owner.Active is False AND Status is not Retired/Disposed AND Make Visible in CI refs is True

Related FLOW:

Trigger:

Scheduled > Daily > pick a time that you want

Actions:

Action: "Lookup Software Records" Use same filters as mentioned above for the report on the table "software (cmdb_ci_spkg)"

Next is flow Logic "For each item in" .. Item = Software record from previous step

Next is action "Update Software Record".. I am updating the product owner field with inactive users > Manager.

I hope this helps!!

Please let me know if there are any further questions.

Thanks,

Malaya