Need help on Answering CMDB & Event management questions

[shaik_irfan]

I Am preparing for Interview can anyone please help me with below answers

With CMDB, what common issues do you see with customers’ CMDB?
· When integrating third party CIs, what are the steps to ensure that duplicates or invalid CIs are populated into the CMDB?
· What situations require that manual CIs be created?
· How do you design and develop the CMDB health dashboard?
· Service mapping
· How do you define business services in terms of application mapping?
· Describe 2-3 of the most challenging applications and underlying technologies that you have mapped in the past.
· When you encounter credential issues, what steps do you take to resolve those issues?
· Event Management
· Describe the process that you follow to integrate a third party monitoring source (say SCOM) into ServiceNow?
· How do you develop the event dashboard in ServiceNow to align the application services to the priorities for the customer?
· How do you link the events with the CMDB and associated CIs / service maps?
· Describe an event rule and how you work with the customer to determine whether an alert should be created

[Hemashekar]

I would encourage attending some of serviceNow webinar and reading their documentation and searching in communities. I am sure full find tons of resources. 

You can also reach out to service now and they will be happy to answer these question.

Below are some of webinars you find interesting and may answer your question.

Ask the Expert: Solving the CMDB Puzzle with Special Guest Speaker

Ask the Expert: Live Chat -Discovery, MID Server, CMDB, Automation, SCCM

Ask the Expert: Live Chat - Discovery | Discover your world - Credentials, CMDB and MID servers

ITOM - A technical transformation - Webinar

Hope this helps

[bernyalvarado · Accepted solution]

Hi Shaik, 

Some of these are very open questions and depending on who you ask you will get very different answers.

For any interview, my best advice will be:

a) prepare: there's plenty information online but the most important of all is the experience. ServiceNow allows you for free to have a personal developer instance and practice CMDB, Discovery and ServiceMapping, etc... within an infrastructure you own.

b) don't lie: don't pretend to be or know something you don't. Try to learn as much as you can, practice, but most importantly, acknowledge that multiple implementations will give you the experience. For an interview it matters a lot that you have gone through the official documentation docs.servicenow.com developers.servicenow.com, that you have practice it yourself and that you have passion about it. Experience comes with time and only those that take the most of each opportunity will earn it.

c) please be aware that I'm very hesitant to answer any of the above questions because each one of those could be a blog post by its own and there's some already out there. I'll copy and paste your questions below and perhaps guide you to the right resources for each.

Finally, all the best on your interview. What you know matters, but the in the interview is mostly about you and the passion you have around the given topic. Any topic can always be learned, but the passion is something few have and makes a great difference in quality of the process and the output delivered. 

Your questions and where to search for each.

· When integrating third party CIs, what are the steps to ensure that duplicates or invalid CIs are populated into the CMDB?

Search for de-duplication tasks. The following should be helpful: blog post. Also search in docs.

· What situations require that manual CIs be created?

Those that can't be discovered.

· How do you design and develop the CMDB health dashboard?

Search for CMDB health dashboard setup in the community and in docs

· Service mapping
· How do you define business services in terms of application mapping?

Search for ServiceMapping definition. A Service is not an application. An application can provide multiple services. A services provides an end service value to an end users and could be decoupled on its own.

· Describe 2-3 of the most challenging applications and underlying technologies that you have mapped in the past.

That's up to your experience :). Remember the advice... don't lie. Be honest. That is also valuable in an interview.

· When you encounter credential issues, what steps do you take to resolve those issues?

Up to experience again. Sometimes people will see that testing a credential works but at the time of Discovery is not working. That will be because they are discovering the wrong device which doesn't have that credential set. In other opportunities the problem is that the credential entered in ServiceNow does not match with the one entered in the device. Sometimes is required to sit down with the engineer responsible of entering the credential and make sure he/she are doing it right.

 
· Event Management
· Describe the process that you follow to integrate a third party monitoring source (say SCOM) into ServiceNow?

Search in the community or in docs for SCOM

· How do you develop the event dashboard in ServiceNow to align the application services to the priorities for the customer?
· How do you link the events with the CMDB and associated CIs / service maps?

For the 2 above search for event dashboard setup in the community or in DOCs.

· Describe an event rule and how you work with the customer to determine whether an alert should be created

Search for event rule in the community and in docs. 

Thanks,

Berny

[shaik_irfan]

Thank you that helps me a lot and i agree that nothing comes by reading or lieing in the interview its all about Hands on experience & more practise 🙂

I have been practicing but the problem people wont hire until you have an hands on experince on the topic on which they are hiring and i am keen & more passionate to go towards ITOM side but i cant get the job until i have hands on experience and without hiring i cant get the hands on experience. My current job is more on ITSM but i want to shift to ITOM.

I hope you understand. 🙂

[bernyalvarado]

Indeed I understand. Here goes a career advice if you want to move to ITOM. 

Start with Event Management and Orchestration. It's easier to setup your own infrastructure based on open source / free tier AWS instances, etc... and then gain some hands-on miles on it. It will also come handy as you then will be able to identify if it's something that you like or dislike. 

Discovery and ServiceMapping is a little bit more complex. It takes some more effort, formal classes and then a problem solving mindset because every implementation will have its own challenges (some of the ones are not even technical).

All the best to you my friend!

Thanks,

Berny