Ask the Expert: Setting up the CMDB Health metrics and applying them to a real world CMDB

[Lisa Latour]

Join us on this discussion page for a YouTube Live Presentation on setting up CMDB health metrics and how to apply them.

It's an opportunity to see how the new CMDB Health Dashboard can help you manage the data quality of server and network device data. This new dashboard provides an actionable view of CI health and a remediation framework to take corrective actions.  

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Featured Expert

Presented by Richard Brounstein, ServiceNow Solution Architect for ITOM, specializing in IT Operations and crafting CMDB solutions for customers, based in the New York City area. He will be hosting a CMDB lab at Knowledge 2017. Before joining ServiceNow, Richard has more than 10 years experience as a System Engineer with Hewlett-Packard.

Watch the Demo Below and Read the Q&A below!
(Be sure to change your YouTube Setting to 720HD)

[richardbrounste]

Hi Vinceb:

When the 1500 WAP devices are updated (or refreshed) in the CMDB, their Updated value will be current and the 500 older ones would have an older value.  Just because 500 devices are not updated does not mean that they don't exist.  It is possible that they could not be confirmed as existing.  Most likely reasons are:

Changed Credentials

Network access from your discovery tool

So, this is something to check out.

As far as a metric that lets you know if too-large-a-number of devices are not refreshed in the last 24 hours, I would recommend that you define a scripted audit.  The scripted audit should scan all CI entries in a class and look at the updated field.  If the updated date is more than 24 hours old and less than 48 hours old for a defined threshold number, then those devices would fail the audit.

This audit can then be shown on the dashboard under the compliance part of the CMDB Health Dashboard.  The advantage of using audits (especially scripted audits) is that you can define as many as you want and they can be very flexible.

-Richard Brounstein

[gwolfkill]

Since you can only have one criteria set per metric per class, I'm struggling with how to handle some Recommended Field scenarios. Here's one example (just adding a few fields to keep it short):

Table: cmdb_ci_server

Metric: Recommended Fields

1. If 'Is Virtual'="True", have 'Supported By', 'Serial Number', 'Operating System'

2. If 'Is Virtual'="False", have 'Supported By', 'Serial Number', 'Operating System' and 'Location'

I can only have one filter for Recommended Fields on the Server table, so I can't accommodate this difference. How can I carve something like this out? I have numerous other situations like this.

[Vijayalakshmi M]

Hi Experts,

Wanted to check what could be the easier way to fix  and handle with the error "failure threshold reached".

As per document, increasing 500 k would decrease the performance. Is there any way we can handle this in effective way.