Governance view in Service Graph Workspace

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated February 10, 2026
  • 7 minutes to read
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    Summary of Governance view in Service Graph Workspace

    The Governance view in Service Graph Workspace is designed for administrators to efficiently manage, monitor, and administer CMDB data ingestion and related functions. Accessible via Workspaces > Service Graph Workspace, it requires thesncmdbadminrole. This view consolidates vital information, important actions, and direct access to tools and dashboards that help maintain CMDB health, data quality, and lifecycle management.

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    Important Actions

    The view highlights critical tasks across categories such as CMDB Health and Data Attestation. Examples include resolving duplicate, orphaned, or stale CIs, and handling data attestation or lifecycle approval tasks. These action cards are dynamically displayed based on configured filters and user roles. Administrators can drill down into tasks and CI lists, with links to dashboards like CMDB Health and De-duplication for bulk processing. Changes affecting health metrics reflect after scheduled CMDB Health Dashboard jobs run.

    Product Highlights

    • CMDB Success Advisor: Supports business outcomes by improving trust in CMDB data across IT workflows.
    • Data Manager: Provides a policy-driven framework for bulk management of CI governance operations such as attestation and lifecycle management.

    What’s New

    The Governance view includes cards showing counts of newly created CIs across types (applications, hardware, service instances) over configurable time intervals (default 24 hours). Selecting these cards reveals Performance Analytics KPI trend details. It also provides recent activity trends with 7-day charts for CI and service instance activities, plus CMDB Health metrics and KPIs with direct navigation to health dashboards. Proper CMDB Health job scheduling is required for data visibility.

    Management Tools and Dashboards

    The Governance view centralizes access to essential CMDB management tools and dashboards categorized as:

    • Manage: Tools like CI Class Manager, Data Manager, CMDB Groups, Dynamic CI Groups, De-duplication Template Library and Dashboard, and CMDB Coverage Dashboard.
    • Optimize: Dashboards including CMDB Success Advisor, CMDB Health, CMDB Data Foundations, CSDM Data Foundations, and De-Duplication Tasks. Also includes remediation rules for proactive issue resolution.
    • Visualize: Dependency Views, Query Builder, and Unified Map provide graphical and query-based visualization of CMDB data and relationships.
    • Create: Capabilities to create new Configuration Items (CIs) and Service Instances while enforcing Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) validations for data integrity.

    Access to some tools and dashboards depends on specific roles and plugins; ensuring appropriate permissions and configurations is essential.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    Using the Governance view enables ServiceNow administrators to:

    • Quickly identify and act on key CMDB health and data quality issues through actionable cards.
    • Leverage comprehensive dashboards and tools to monitor CMDB completeness, data foundations, and lifecycle management.
    • Efficiently manage bulk governance operations such as attestation, lifecycle approvals, and de-duplication to maintain CMDB integrity.
    • Visualize complex CI dependencies and build sophisticated queries to support IT service management and operational decision-making.
    • Create new CIs and service instances with confidence that data quality and uniqueness standards are met.

    Governance view in Service Graph Workspace provides administrators with important information, actions, and links to tools that are used to manage, monitor, and administer data ingestion and other CMDB functions.

    The Governance view in Service Graph Workspace provides the data and tools described in this topic.

    Access

    Navigate to Workspaces > Service Graph Workspace, and then, in the navigation panel, select the Governance icon.

    Role required: sn_cmdb_admin

    Important actions

    Important actions of various categories that require your attention or action. There are several task categories such as:
    • Health tasks generated by CMDB Health: In health-related cards, such as Duplicate CIs, Orphan CIs, stale CIs, and De-Duplication tasks, select View CIs or View Tasks to show the list of associated CIs or important tasks. In the CI list view page, you can select CMDB Health Dashboard to open the CMDB Health Dashboard. In de-duplication-related cards generated by IRE, you can access the De-duplication dashboard and de-duplication libraries, to process de-duplication tasks in bulk.
    • Data attestation and life cycle approval tasks generated by the CMDB Data Manager: In data attestation-related cards, such as Reassignment Requests and Unassigned Overdue cards, select View Tasks to drill down to the associated important tasks.
    Important actions are stored in the CMDB WS Imp Action Card Config [sn_cmdb_ws_imp_action_card_config] table that is accessible for editing only to users with the sn_cmdb_admin role. Authorized users can modify attributes of an important action such as Active and Filter conditions, but can't modify the Type, Persona, and Table attributes.
    • Important action cards show per the logged in user role, as specified in the CMDB WS Imp Action Card Config [sn_cmdb_ws_imp_action_card_config] table.
    • A card appears only if there is at least one record that meets the card's filter condition.
    • If you drill down a Health-related card and modify an associated CI, any resulting impact to health KPIs might appear only after the next cycle of the CMDB Health Dashboard jobs.
    For information about managing the cards in the Important actions tile, see Modify important actions on the Governance view of Service Graph Workspace.

    Product highlights

    Featured CMDB applications and tools available directly from the Governance view.
    CMDB success advisor
    Drive business outcomes by establishing trust in CMDB data across your targeted IT workflows.
    Data Manager
    Leverage a policy-driven framework for bulk management of CI governance operations such as attestation and life cycle management. Select Get started to skip to the CMDB Data Manager in Service Graph Workspace.

    What's new

    Counts of newly created CIs within a recent time interval. The New CIs total counts all CI types including applications, hardware, and Service instances, which also appear in separate cards in the tile. By default, historical data is aggregated for the Last 24 hours, which you can set to a different time interval such as Last 7 days.

    Select a card to drill down to a Performance Analytics KPI Details pane that shows the trend for the respective item.

    Counts in the What's new cards are based on the following tables:
    Count Table
    New CIs Configuration Item [cmdb_ci]
    New application Application [cmdb_ci_appl]
    New hardware Hardware [cmdb_ci_hardware]
    New Service instances Service Instance [cmdb_ci_service_auto]

    Recent activity trends

    The following cards show recent activities in the CMDB:
    Recent CI activity
    A 7-day chart showing metrics and trend line related to CIs such as the number of new CIs and updated CIs.
    Recent service instance activity

    A 7-day chart showing metrics and trend line related to Application services such as the total number of Service instances, new and updated Service instances, and the number of Service instances with outages.

    CMDB Health

    Health metrics for CIs and relationships. Select the percentage numbers to navigate to the CMDB Health and CMDB Relationship Health dashboards. KPIs health scores calculated by CMDB Health for CIs. Select a percentage number for a KPI to navigate to the KPIs tile on the CMDB Health Dashboard. For more information, see CMDB Health KPIs and metrics.

    If the CMDB Health Dashboard jobs aren't running, then there won't be any health reporting until those jobs run. Select Go to CMDB Health Dashboard jobs to configure CMDB Health and to activate those jobs.

    Additional requirements CMDB Health asset, sn_cmdb_editor, or itil role.

    CMDB success advisor

    Supports targeted business outcomes by improving CMDB data quality across Data Foundations and individual applications including Hardware Asset Management (HAM). For more information, see CMDB success advisor.

    Management tools

    Provides links that you can use to access CMDB dashboards, tools, and list views. The links are grouped by categories as described below.
    Note:
    Some links are conditionally available based on installation of applications, active plugins, and your assigned role. For a link that doesn't appear, make sure that all the requirements for the link are met.
    Manage:
    • CI Class Manager: Centrally view, create, or edit class definitions and class settings for Identification and Reconciliation (IRE) and for CMDB Health.

      Additional role requirement: sn_cmdb_editor, personalize_dictionary, or itil.

    • Data Manager: Centrally create, edit, review, publish, and track Data Manager policies and the tasks generated by the policies.
    • CMDB Groups: Show a list view of current CMDB groups where you can create new CMDB groups, and manage the existing CMDB groups. A CMDB group is a collection of CIs to which you can apply CI actions collectively to all the CIs in the group. For example, CMDB Health can monitor CIs in a Health-type CMDB group, and report the aggregated health for the group as a whole.
    • Dynamic CI Groups: Show a list view of current dynamic CI groups where you can create new dynamic CI groups, and manage the existing ones. Dynamic CI Groups act as application services (Service instances) that are populated with members of the CMDB group that is associated with the dynamic CI group. For more information about dynamic CI groups, see Application services.
    • De-duplication Template Library: Create and manage de-duplication templates and libraries to process de-duplication tasks in bulk.
    • De-duplication Dashboard: Show counts and insights for duplicate CIs in the CMDB, and run and track de-duplication templates to process de-duplication tasks in bulk.
    • CMDB Coverage Dashboard: Show details of CMDB discovery completeness by correlating IP addresses from IPAM systems with discovered configuration items (CIs).
    Optimize:
    • CMDB success advisor: Monitor and improve CMDB data quality for targeted business outcomes across Data Foundations and individual applications including Hardware Asset Management (HAM).

      Role required: sn_cmdb_admin

    • CMDB Health: View the CMDB Health dashboards and configure the CMDB health KPIs and metrics that CIs are evaluated by in CMDB Health dashboards.

      Additional requirements:
    • CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard: View the CMDB Data Foundations dashboard where you can explore potential risks in the CMDB implementation, and verify that important data is valid and properly configured.

      Additional requirements:
    • CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard: View the CSDM Data Foundations dashboard where you can explore key CSDM metrics on a single page to assist you in getting the full benefit from your implementation.

      Additional requirements:
    • De-Duplication Tasks: Process a de-duplication task by using the Duplicate CI Remediator wizard which guides you through the duplicate CI reconciliation process.

      Additional role requirement: sn_cmdb_editor or itil.

    • CMDB Remediation Rules: Rules associated with a CMDB Health task that was created for a failed CMDB Health test. A CMDB remediation rule runs a remediation workflow to remediate an issue reported by CMDB Health.
    Visualize:
    • Dependency Views: Provides a graphic infrastructure view for a CI and any applications or business services that it is part of and that it supports.

      Additional role requirement: dependency_views.

    • Query Builder: Easily build complex infrastructure and service queries, that span multiple CMDB classes, non-CMDB tables, and that can involve many CIs that are connected by different relationships.

      Additional role requirement: cmdb_query_builder_read.

    • Unified Map: A graphical hierarchical map of the CMDB and its CIs, and the connections between them. Unified Map combines some of the capabilities of Dependency Views and of Service Mapping into a single map experience in Service Graph Workspace.
    Create:

    Additional role requirement: service_admin.