Best practice - CI relationships & Retiring

[David107]

We have a consultant review our CMDB and one of the recommendation he gave was that we write a script to remove CI relationships when a CI is retired. While I can see the logic in this, I'm struggling on if this is best practice or not. I'm thinking if this were best practice, ServiceNow would have built it into the base toolset by now, right?

What are others doing? 

[Deleted Profile]

I would suggest that removing a CI constitutes a change that impacts the CIs on the other side of the relationships... they in turn should have CRs that redirect the connections to the replacement CI and update the relationships accordingly.

If you retire a database server, wouldn't you include updates to the apps that connect to it? Wouldn't those updates also require CRs to update the CI data... including the relationships?

[Andrew Westerv4]

Every Change Management process is different from organizations and won't assume everyone would goes through new system provisioning/retirement processes through Change to always rely on this.

Even from an automated process like Service Mapping, if the relationship between systems doesn't exist anymore then they are removed automatically. A server (web, app, database, etc) that gets retired would be removed from that map.

As for the idea of "redirecting" connections, that doesn't really make sense. The new servers, even as replacements, would be new relationships and not updating the old ones. They should follow the same on-boarding process as any other new CI.

[AndyLock]

@Andrew Westervelt 

Are able to point me to the documentation around the automatic maintenance of expired relationships?

thx,