CMDB Design Decision: Ping probes

jrbockrath — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:59:19 GMT

CMDB Design Decision

Would you make the same call?

During onboarding, we found a ScienceLogic export containing approximately 2,300 "devices."

After reviewing the records, 419 of them appeared to be Ping/ICMP probe artifacts rather than actual configuration items.

Characteristics included:

No serial number
No MAC address
Hostname was simply the IP address
No additional identifying attributes

The design question became:

Would you allow these records to become CIs, or would you exclude them before they entered the CMDB?

Our conclusion was to exclude them because they represented monitoring artifacts rather than managed configuration items. In this case, that reduced the candidate population by roughly 18%.

I'm curious how others approach this. Is this something you would treat as a discovery configuration issue, an identification issue, or simply an upstream governance decision?

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CMDB Design Decision: Ping probes