How does your organization deal with Stale CIs?

[Batman3]

Do you change the status of a CI after a period of inactivity? 

We leverage the Operational Status field, I was thinking of changing the status of a hardware CI to non-operational after a period of 90 days or so using the staleness metric in the CMDB dashboard via a stale remediation task. Once that occurs I figured I could create a business rule to exclude those non-operational hardware CIs from being used in our ITSM processes until it checks back in.

Is this a poor idea? Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions regarding how they maintain an active representation of their environment in the CMDB?

[Ashutosh Munot1 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

We usually see why this is a stale CI.

For example:

1) If this CI is created by Discovery then we see if there is any change done on this CI on network or do we have any error's for this CI while discovering it.

2) If this is update or created using a import set then we contact Owner's of this CI and then take actions on this.

Now if you want to exclude them from been visible to our ITSM processes then it depends on how you implement it. CI field on incident has a reference qualifier, their also you can exclude this CI by marking them as Non Operation as you said above. But before marking them non operation do initial analysis where it is really non operation on real network or not.

Business rule option may be risky sometimes. Where are this CI visible and used matter's a lot to decide on hiding them.

Thanks,
Ashutosh Munot

[Andrew Westerv4]

I would agree that marking some Configuration Item types, like software packages or network adapters, to be disabled or deleted after a set time period described. However, I think your end goal for more important CI types, like computers and network gear, to have the assigned support teams to update the status as appropriately. I'd suggest leveraging Desired State to assign those compliance tasks to them and research the reason of staleness. That way you can delegate the remediation whether its updating the state to retired or correcting the source ability to discover/update the CI.