Deleting all items in the CMDB.

[HugoFirst]

I have a request from several users to delete all the items in the CMDB. The idea is that we have alot of items in the CMDB which are no longer in existence that this will provide us with a clean slate.   We would then run the discovery jobs to repopulate it with current information.

My question is this, what will we regret if we do this?     I expect to lose the history of previouslt filed incidents and problems.   We even have some business maps setup which will probably need rework.   But is there anything else?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has done this to learn from their experience.   And I'm also open to any advice on the topic.

[wipeout630]

Steve,

I would avoid this at all costs.   It will take some man hours to clean up the CMDB but it will keep your existing data intact; you never know when you'll need historical data again especially with new disciplines for Service Management cropping up.   As an alternative, you could create a new Company, move all users over to the new Company, and deactivate the old company.   You would still have access to all of the old records but the new Company would appear to be a clean slate.

[sgrison · Accepted solution]

1) Delete the records if they are garbage and you don't have a need for the historical records

2) Update the status on the CI records to 'retired' or something similar

[HugoFirst]

Just some background:

We had a need to retain historical records and for the most part, the CMDB contained valid data.   Our problem is that we had way too many systems in the CMDB which no longer existed.   So we followed Sean's advice and started marking them as retired.   We also updated the various reports, lists, etc to filter on CI's which have a status of Installed.

We did run into an issue doing this though.   There are 3 status variables for a system, Hardware Status, Install Status and Operational Status.   Initially, we chose to expose and set Install Status.   However, our savvy users added Operational Status and Hardware status to their list views and noted that they did not agree with Install Status.   So we now set all three to keep them consistent.

[Subhajit1]

Hi Steve,

Agree with Sean here on the Second Part.

It is not at all recommended to Delete the Data. You can create a new Status of your CIs like Retired and then Move it to Active=false status. You will have to Update your Reference Qualifiers so that the Retired (Inactive) ones do not show up for Selection. You will also have to change the Module Filters(Arguments) to Hide these old CIs. You will need to work on the BSM to bypass these CIs.

Thanks,

Subhajit