CMDB Health

Monitoring and maintaining the health of the CMDB is essential to an effective and continuous use of the product. Health indicators such as duplicate CIs, required CI fields, and audits contribute to the calculation of health scorecards at the CI, class, and CMDB level.

Note:

CMDB Health doesn't support non-CMDB tables.

The health of the CMDB data is monitored and reported for the following KPIs, each further consisting of sub metrics:

• Completeness: CIs are tested for required and recommended fields that are not populated.
• Correctness: CIs are tested against pre-defined data integrity rules such as identification rules (to detect duplicate CIs), orphan CI rules, and stale CI rules.
• Compliance: The CMDB data is audited for adherence to pre-defined certificates.
• Relationships: The health of CI relationships is tested for indicators such as orphan and duplicate relationships. And for compliance with suggested relationships, hosting and containment rules.

After CIs are tested for various health indicators, the results are aggregated at the class level, and eventually at the overall CMDB level. You can configure how health is calculated and the weight of each KPI and each metric at every level of the aggregation. For most health tests, you can configure the health tests themselves.

CMDB Health experience in CMDB Workspace

You can use the CMDB Workspace landing page and its views to access CMDB health details that are based on CMDB Health activities and aggregations. For example:

• Use the Important actions tile on the landing page to access cards with CMDB Health-related tasks such as de-duplication tasks.
• Use the CMDB Health tile to see overall health metrics for CIs and relationships, to navigate to the CMDB Health and CMDB Relationship Health dashboards, and to drill down to more health details for specific CIs.
• Use tiles throughout the CMDB Workspace to drill down to health overviews of specific CIs.

CI remediation

CMDB Health provides a framework for configuring CI remediation. Remediation lets you proactively apply corrective actions to unhealthy CIs in a managed and standardized fashion.

Domain separation

CMDB Health is domain aware. If the domain separation plugin has been activated, then the CMDB dashboard displays health based on data, rules, and settings from the logged-on user domain. If rules and settings are not defined for a child domain, then the parent's settings are applied, recursively.

Metric tests from the global domain propagate to subdomains. However, subdomains can have their own local metric tests which override the global domain tests. Up until the San Diego release, subdomain local metric tests were applied to the subdomain CIs and also to the global domain CIs (which are visible on subdomains). Global domain CIs that failed metric tests of local subdomains, could have generated large amounts of data due to duplicated data.

Starting with the Tokyo release, CIs in the global domain are evaluated only against metric tests specified in the global domain. In subdomains, local metric tests are applied only to the CIs in that subdomain and are not applied to the global domain CIs (even though the global domain CIs are visible in the subdomain). Health results for CIs in the global domain appear on subdomains and health results on subdomains reflect this new behavior.

See Domain separation in CMDB Health for more information.

Setup

To start gathering and aggregating health data, you need to enable the CMDB Health-related jobs (CMDB Health Dashboard jobs) which are initially disabled. You also need to configure CMDB Health related system properties and health KPI and metric test rules, to customize how aggregated data is calculated and other CMDB Health behavior.

For all the details about setting up and configuring CMDB Health, see Set up and configure CMDB Health.

• Domain separation in CMDB Health
  This is an overview of domain separation as it pertains to CMDB Health. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.
• CMDB Health KPIs and metrics
  The overall CMDB health score consists of three Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are correctness, compliance, and completeness, each further consisting of sub-metrics. Each KPI and metric is associated with a scorecard that determines its contribution to the aggregated health at the overall CMDB level, class, and CI level.
• CMDB Health dashboards
  CMDB dashboards display CMDB health reports and let you configure the CMDB health KPIs and metrics that CIs are evaluated for.
• View CMDB health reports
  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.
• View services health reports
  The CMDB service dashboard serves as a central location to view aggregated health reports for services at a glance. Also, it lets you drill into a service to perform remediation actions that address health issues, and that improve CMDB health. The CMDB service dashboard uses the Performance Analytics framework for dashboards and employs the capabilities it provides.
• View CMDB groups health reports
  The CMDB group view dashboard serves as a central location to view aggregated health reports for CMDB groups at a glance. Also, it lets you drill into a CMDB group to perform remediation actions that address health issues, and that improve CMDB health. The CMDB group view dashboard uses the Performance Analytics framework for dashboards and employs the capabilities it provides.
• View CI health
  The CI dashboard is a central location displaying health report for an individual CI, history of changes to the CI in a timeline view, and the relation formatter. The CI dashboard also displays incidents, changes, and other tasks affecting the CI, and business services affected by the CI. You can access the CI dashboard from a CI form, or from the CMDB dashboard.
• View CI relationships health
  View aggregated orphan, stale, and duplicate CI relationships in the CMDB dashboard. You can configure the relationship scorecards, but you cannot configure the underlying relationship KPI health tests.
• Create CMDB remediation rule
  A CMDB remediation rule is associated with a task that was created for a failed CMDB health test. A CMDB remediation rule is applied automatically or manually to execute a remediation workflow that can, for example, delete stale CIs.
• CMDB Health process tracking
  Use the following information to track and resolve issues with the CMDB Health processes.