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]

Clearing the cache from your browser is required by the user after every job run. If you don't manually clear your browser cache, you will have to wait 2 hours before it will refresh the data automatically.

[tphillips]

I am seeing THOUSANDS of Stale CIs that don't have the Most Recent Discovery populated.   Most of these are Child CIs - disk drive partitions, patches, memory modules, etc. where the Parent CI's Most Recent Discovery field is populated.      

Am I correct in that "Use probe cache results" Mid-server property and "Cache results" Discovery Probe setting might also be contributing to the large numbers of Stale CIs?

Cleaning all these up is taking a lot of time.   Are there plans to fix, resolve or change this via a hotfix or patch?

Looking forward for more information about the CMDB Health Dashboard!

[richardbrounste]

In Jakarta, we are adding a Health Inclusion facility. You will be able to set a filter to filter out just those classes for which you care about tracking for staleness or orphans.

What is the date of your most_recent_discovery field in all these child CIs? If it is older than 60 days, then they will come up as stale. In the meantime, you could have a script that sets the most_recent_discovery (last_updated) to "NOW" and run it every month so the CIs don't come up stale.

[tphillips]

The field on the child CIs is not being populated... so ... NULL.

I've been running a script to populate the field but that seems to be an underhanded way of doing it.  

[soren_dittmer]

I'm trying to change the CI Identification rule for a single class. In the hierarchy CI -> Hardware -> Computer -> Server -> UNIX Server -> AIX Server, I get a lot of duplicates on the AIX servers. These AIX servers are in reality LPARs on a POWER8 server, and they show the same serial number.

Therefore, I would like to substitute the CI Identification rules on (and inherited from) class Hardware ("Hardware rule") with a rule specific for AIX Servers. The specific CI Identification rule for the AIX servser should consist of a sinkgle match on the ID (asset_tag) which should be unique for servers.

I have created and activated this rule for AIX Servers, and I have deactivated the "Hardware rule" for the same class. However, I see no diffference   in the duplicate count... (have flushed the cache, yes)...

What did I miss?

Thanks in advance,

Søren