Ask the Expert: CMDB Basics with Steven Bell, MVP

[Lisa Latour]

CMDB is always a HOT TOPIC!

Now's your chance to ask Steven Bell, Accenture & Community MVP, your CMDB questions.

The Configuration Management Database in ServiceNow is the core repository for Configuration Items. The following topics will be covered:

1. CMDB Table Structure
2. Field Inheritance
3. What is a CI?
4. CI Relationships
5. Classification of CIs
6. Useful tips when creating CIs
7. The use of CIs in ITIL, and in Discovery

Join us on this discussion to watch the presentation and
Post your questions  (Video Below)

Featured Expert

Steven Bell is an Architect Manager and ServiceNow Trainer for Accenture Cloud-First.   He has over 30 years of Developer experience.   His areas of expertise include Application Development, Development Process, Orchestration, Discovery, Asset Management, Software Quality Assurance.   Steven's prior experience includes web services development in C#/.Net.   He earned a BS in Computer Science from Texas Tech University - Lubbock.

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Originally recorded February 5, 2019

RESOURCES

• Mini-Lab: Displaying all Affected CIs on a Business Service Form

• Mini-Lab: Displaying all Affected CIs on a Problem Form

• Pragmatic Patterns — Basic Business Service Management Patterns
• Pragmatic Patterns — Hybrid Business Service Management Patterns

• Community Code Snippets - Simplifying Code With Field Normalization

Steve’s Article List

Community Code Snippets: Articles List to Date

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=289d6a69dbd0dbc01dcaf3231f9619f0

[Damhoej]

Here is a question:

cmdb_ci_hyper_v_server class is under Hardware, but it links to a windows server which is also under hardware. Why?

So you might accidently create two assets for the same hypervisor 😉

There is a lack of "how to do CMDB without Discovery".
I have seen a lot of articles and videos about population the CMDB, but nearly all is about Discovery, and the few without discovery talks about the top level classes (computer class etc.)

There must be reason that the classes are divided into subclasses, but I sometimes miss the explanation of the logic behind the classes.

[sabell2012]

Damhøj:

A lot of times it is simply to have a place to separate the CIs.  I believe that is the case with Hypervisor.  Look at the fields that are added onto the HV table and see where it differs from the Windows Server table.

Steven.

[JA12]

Hi there,

How do i verify that our IT Assets information is matching the information in CMDB/CI? 

[sabell2012 · Accepted solution]

JA:

There are a couple of approaches to this:

1. From the Asset table (Hardware, etc) look for all records with an empty cmdb ci field.  Those will not necessarily have an analog in the CMDB table.

2. From the CMDB tables look for all records with the Asset field not filled in.  Those will likely not have an analog in the Asset tables.

Not all assets will generate CMDB records automatically and visa-versa.  It depends on how your Model Category table is configured.  It also depends on when it was implemented.

This kind of diff reporting takes patience and time.  There is no quick process for this.

Steven.

[johnnyjava]

Steven is (as usual) quite right. This work can make one weary. Luckily there are ways to help yourself using a view for the Lists.

Here is a view I created on alm_hardware called "Asset & CI". It dotwalks the fields on the CI to help show where linkages might be broken.

Don't forget you can also use the "is different" operator on your condition builder, which is the "NSAMEAS" encoded query operator. (great for scripting, hint hint...)

Records returned on "sys_idNSAMEASci.asset.sys_id" or similar would be ones that might require some manual attention.

i opted to stem the flow of these by enhancing the AssetandCI script include to be better at handling possible duplicates during Asset and/or CI creation when an insert happens on either side.