View CMDB health reports
Summarize
Summary of View CMDB Health Reports
The CMDB dashboard provides a centralized view of aggregated health reports for your Configuration Management Database (CMDB). It allows users to monitor CMDB health status and address any health issues, enhancing overall data integrity. For effective use, configuration of the CMDB Health and enabling the relevant dashboard jobs are required to collect and display health data automatically.
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Key Features
- Dashboard Access: Navigate to Configuration > CMDB Dashboard > CMDB View to access the dashboard, which requires the asset or itil role for functionality.
- Health Views: The dashboard offers two primary views: CI Health and Relationship Health, each providing specific scorecards and reports on health indicators.
- Drill-Down Capabilities: Users can click on scorecards and charts to access detailed information about health metrics, incidents, and alerts.
- Color Coding: Health statuses are color-coded (Green, Orange, Red, Gray) based on defined thresholds, allowing quick visual assessment of CI conditions.
- Responsive Layout: Users can customize the dashboard by adding or removing widgets to suit their reporting needs.
- Domain Awareness: When the Domain Support plugin is active, the dashboard aggregates health data based on user domain visibility, allowing for tailored KPI settings.
Key Outcomes
By utilizing the CMDB dashboard, ServiceNow customers can expect to:
- Gain comprehensive insights into the health of their CMDB, identifying issues like duplicates, or stale configuration items (CIs).
- Improve operational efficiency by enabling proactive monitoring and management of CI relationships.
- Customize health metrics and thresholds specific to their domain needs, promoting better governance and oversight.
The CMDB dashboard serves as a central location to view aggregated health reports for your CMDB at a glance which helps you understand the CMDB health status. Also, it provides functions to address health issues, and improve CMDB health.
The CMDB dashboard requires some configuration before it can display meaningful data. Once CMDB Health is configured and the CMDB Health Dashboard Jobs are enabled, the dashboard displays data that is automatically collected and calculated on a recurring schedule. The CMDB dashboard uses the Performance Analytics framework for dashboards and employs some of the capabilities it provides. The CMDB dashboard is domain aware.
Using the CMDB dashboard requires the asset or itil role.
- Sharing responsive dashboards (Sharing), see Share a responsive dashboard.
Note:Only users with the itil role can view a CMDB dashboard which has been shared.
- How score cards in CMDB Health dashboards are calculated, see CMDB Health Dashboard Score Card Explained [KB0829828].
Access and configuration
- Click CMDB Health Dashboard Jobs to enable and manage the jobs that monitor and collect health data for CIs and CI relationships.
- Click the default CMDB Dashboard - CMDB View dashboard to list additional CMDB drill-in dashboards.
The CMDB dashboard has two viewing modes. Click CI Health or Relationship Health to toggle between them.
CMDB Health view
- Scorecards detailing the overall health of CIs in your CMDB, per health KPI and metric
- Useful reports showing a breakdown of any duplicate, orphan, or stale CIs by class
- Widgets that list the top 10 incident, alert, and change generating CIs in the CMDB
All the default widgets in the CI Class view can be filtered using the CMDB class hierarchy tree. Initially, the class hierarchy filter is set to the root class, Configuration Item (All). Click All to select a different class, filtering all widgets on the dashboard to display data only for the selected class and its child classes.
In each scorecard widget, the horizontal bar in the center and the % number are correlated, displaying the aggregated health summary for the KPI. Health results of associated metrics are displayed underneath, each contributing according to the configuration of the metric scorecard, and its threshold.
Except for the Overall health scorecard, you can drill into any widget in the CI Class view:
- In a scorecard widget: Click the large aggregated percent number or the health bar to drill into a more detailed dashboard for that KPI.
- In a charts widget: Click a bar to display a list of all the records that the bar represents.
- In lists: Click the ‘i’ icon to view a list of all the tasks or alerts related to the CI.
For more details about the CMDB Health dashboard, see the CMDB Health Dashboard Score Card Explained knowledge base article.
Relationship Health view
The Relationship Health view displays various scorecards for health indicators of CI relationships in your CMDB. It contains charts detailing any duplicate, orphan or stale relationships, broken down by relationship type. You can drill down these charts for further details.
Changing the CI Class selection while in the Relationship view has no effect on the data displayed in this view.
Color codes
Both, the CI class view and the relationship view, use color codes when displaying aggregated health status. The status definitions are based on each scorecard’s threshold limits that are defined in the CI Class Manager.
| Color code | Definition | Default threshold setting |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Best | Less than or equal to 33 |
| Orange | At risk | More than 33 and less than or equal to 67 |
| Red | Critical | More than 67 |
| Gray | Incomplete | N/A |
icon indicates that the maximum failure threshold for the scorecard has been reached. The tests for the metric are halted for this cycle, and all associated aggregated summaries are 0%. Review the scorecard rules which
might be ineffective, or the CMDB might be in an unstable state.Dashboard layout configuration
The CMDB dashboard uses some of the capabilities that Performance Analytics provides for responsive dashboards. You can, for example, add or remove widgets from the layout.
For information about adding a widget (Add Widgets) and changing other layout settings such as adding a tab (Create Tab) to the dashboard, see Edit a dashboard. The drop-down that appears when adding a widget, includes CMDB-related widgets that are used in CMDB dashboards and other system widgets which are typically not relevant in CMDB reports.
Domain separation
- The CMDB dashboard aggregates and reports health failures and scores based on user’s domain visibility of CIs. If domain visibility lets a user see a CI, then the audit rule in that user’s domain applies to that CI, whether the CI is in the user's domain or in a contained domain. If a CI fails health tests from different user domains, then separate failure records are created.
- Users can configure KPI and metric settings specific to the needs in their domain. So different domains can have different settings such as active/inactive, and thresholds.
- A child domain derives its immediate parent's domain health configurations if the child domain does not configure its own. A child domain can override parent's configurations by modifying them.