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

[amititp]

Greetings Steven, one point wanted to clarify when you say 'Not all assets will generate CMDB records automatically and visa-versa', and while agreeing on this comment shouldn't there a Business Rule be triggered every time an ASSET or CI impacting respective table, to automate ASSET & CI compliment each other?

[yeskaytee]

Hello Steven, is there any automated way to upload CIs into cmdb.

We often get requests to add one/two/few or many CIs at once to the cmdb table.

And these requests come from different teams....server, network, Enterprise application. Which means the  they should be loaded to different tables depending on the class. And each table (class) will have their own custom fields defined.

ServiceNow admin team end up doing these tickets manually thus wasting a lot of time and resources.

How can we automate trough a simple form the upload capability depending the class they want to load data to.

We want each team to have their own automated way to upload and maintain their own data. Few checks we want to put in place is no duplicate CI name. And result summary after each upload on inserts, updates and ignored(due to duplicate name).

[Damhoej]

one way to do it:

extract the Excel template from ServiceNow and have the teams fill in the fields, then you can import it to the table.

Go to the target table
Click on the column menu
 

Select "Import"

When the team sends the excel sheet you can import it and get the job done in a short time.
It can be automated.

[amititp]

You can certainly do so, with various approaches:

     1. if you have DISCOVERY running, utilize schedules by groups/IP segments/Departments, etc...

     2. You can use Import / Transform Maps with relationships Business Rules Trigger everytime an import to certain CI Tables.

     3. Leverage New York+ DISC/CMDB Features to easily adopt & maintain CMDB.

Good luck.

[Mary Vanatta]

Are you planning to update to align with CSDM 2.0?