CMDB Health process tracking and troubleshooting
Summarize
Summary of CMDB Health process tracking and troubleshooting
This content guides ServiceNow customers on how to track and resolve issues within the CMDB Health processes. It explains key components such as logging, processing status, handling of orphan records, and troubleshooting common CMDB Health dashboard messages.
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Logging
By default, only error messages from CMDB Health are logged to the syslog table. To capture additional 'info' and 'warning' messages—useful for tracking processing cycle start and end—you can enable this via the system property glide.cmdb.logger.usesyslog.CMDBHealth. This helps in detailed monitoring and troubleshooting.
Processing Status
If data is missing from the CMDB Health dashboard despite scheduled jobs running, check the CMDB Health Metric Status [cmdbhealthmetricstatus] table. Metrics initially show as 'In Progress' and can reach these final states:
- Complete: All classes processed successfully, failures are below the threshold.
- Max Failures: Metric processing aborted due to exceeding failure count; will retry on next run.
- Daily Time Out Pause: Processing time limit reached; processing pauses and resumes next run.
KPI states depend on associated metrics’ states and can be Complete, Incomplete (due to failure threshold), or Daily Time Out Pause.
Processing Time Analysis
To identify classes causing processing delays or timeouts, examine the CMDB Health Processor Status [cmdbhealthprocessorstatus] table. Classes marked Complete have finished processing; those marked Draft are pending. By analyzing update timestamps, you can pinpoint slow classes and investigate weak validation rules.
Orphan Records and Broken Hierarchy
Orphan CIs may appear due to hierarchy inconsistencies caused by partial deletions in the CMDB tables. These orphans cannot be accessed or removed via GlideRecord and require direct database deletion. ServiceNow Support assistance is necessary for such deletions. Orphan test results specify exactly where the hierarchy is broken, helping you understand which records must be cleaned across related CMDB tables.
Scripted Audits Skipped
If scripted audit results are excluded from the compliance KPI, it is often because the audit script lacks a populated Last ran date field. Without this date, CMDB Health cannot recognize the audit run as recent and skips the results, which can impact compliance visibility.
Common CMDB Health Dashboard Messages
- Failure threshold reached: Indicates too many CIs failed metric tests, hitting the configured failure limit.
- Incomplete score: Metric score calculation failed, typically due to processing issues.
Next Steps and Related Concepts
To further enhance CMDB Health management, customers can explore features such as the CMDB Health experience in CMDB Workspace, the CMDB Health dashboard, and reference materials. Related tasks include viewing relationship and CI health and creating remediation rules to address identified issues.
Use the following information to track and resolve issues with the CMDB Health processes.
Logging
By default, only error messages are logged to the syslog table, with the source name CmdbHealth. To enable logging of 'info' and 'warning' messages (which are typically logged at the start and end of each processing cycle), update the system property glide.cmdb.logger.use_syslog.CMDBHealth. For information about using this property, see CMDB Health system properties.
Processing status
If scheduled jobs are enabled, but data is not displaying on the <ph keyref="var.config-mgmt-database-short"/> dashboard, you can check the processing status in the CMDB Health Metric Status [cmdb_health_metric_status] table. Depending on the status of the inactive metric, decide how to proceed.
Initially, the state of all metrics is 'In Progress'.
- Complete
- All classes are processed and the number of failures is under the maximum failures threshold.
- Max Failures
- The number of failures for this metric reached the maximum failures threshold. Processing has been aborted and will start over in the next run.
- Daily Time Out Pause
- The processor reached the processing time limit. Processing is paused and will resume in the next run.
- Complete
- All associated metrics are in Complete state and score calculation is complete.
- Incomplete
- Score is not calculated because one of the associated metrics reached its maximum failure thresholds.
- Daily Time Out Pause
- Timed out because one of the associated metrics has reached its processing time limit.
Processing time
If processing of a metric times out, you can find out which class takes too long to process. Use this information to find out if any validation rules are weak.
The progress of each metric is tracked in the CMDB Health Processor Status table [cmdb_health_processor_status]. Status for classes that have been processed for a metric is Complete, and for classes that are yet to be processed is Draft. By looking at the update time for each class, you can calculate the length of processing time for each class.
Orphan records due to broken hierarchy
Orphan rules might detect an orphan CI, which you are not able to access and delete. Or, there might be a mismatch between the list view that displays the orphan records, and the total number of records. These findings are due to records being deleted in the database from only one table in the CMDB hierarchy.
These CI records are not accessible via GlideRecord and must be deleted directly from the database. Therefore, in this case, to delete an orphan CI from the database you must contact Support to get help.
Orphan test results provide the details of where exactly the hierarchy is broken. For example, the message "This cmdb_ci_linux_server CI [91054fc24f22520053d6e1d18110c713] is missing record in cmdb_ci_computer table" means that a record of that sys_id must be deleted from the CMDB, cmdb_ci, cmdb_ci_hardware, cmdb_ci_server, and the cmdb_ci_linux_server tables (the Computer class is between the Hardware and the Server classes in the hierarchy.)
Scripted audits Skipped
An error message is logged if the results from a scripted audit are not included in the compliance KPI. The reason can be that the script in the audit was not updated to populate its Last ran date field. Without a Last ran date value, CMDB Health is unable to identify these run results as part of a recent complete audit run, and skips those results.