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Mary Vanatta1
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Getting your CMDB aligned to CSDM may seem complicated and hard to do. Yet, many companies have been successful in making progress with CSDM and getting their CMDB to a satisfactory level. It takes time, effort, and careful planning. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward way to do it. This article will give you 20 steps to start this task and make it less daunting.

Aligning with the CSDM data model can bring value and adoption of the platform. It can reduce the mean time to resolve issues, decrease outages, help you make better decisions, and increase productivity. You'll also better understand your business's products, services, and infrastructure. Good data is important for making informed decisions and running your business the best way possible.

Explaining CSDM: an analogy
Do you ever feel like you don't know where everything should go when you move into a new house or reorganize your storage? It can be hard to figure out where to put things like spices, silverware, pots, and pans. It's important to keep these things in the right place - like keeping socks in the dresser and spices in the kitchen. It's the same way with running a business. You need to know what services you offer, who supports those services, and assure they align with your organization's capabilities.  Like the things in your home, the data in the CMDB is will help you to run and manage your business. 

 

Where do you get started? How do you move your data while it is in use? Follow these steps. 

20 steps to CSDM to remediate and remodel your data structure

  1. Obtain executive sponsorship -  Getting started on a project may require the help of several people from different teams or departments. Executive management needs to make clear that it is not just the responsibility of the person in charge of the ServiceNow platform or the CMDB manager to align and keep the data maintained. Everyone needs to stay involved and engaged as the data is being fixed.

  2. Form a small SWAT team. Form a small group of people to help collect information about business applications, services, and supporting technology. This group should include those responsible for ITSM and Configuration Management processes, application owners, product or service owners, and enterprise architects. The group might need help from other business units to get data related to the business. The ServiceNow administrators or developers will be tasked to re-classify the data to the correct tables, re-map the attributes and be able to import new data into the platform.

  3. Get expert help. Most ServiceNow customers find success when working with partners who have delivered on a CSDM alignment transformation. ServiceNow Expert Services or a ServiceNow Certified Partner will help guide you and avoid time-consuming missteps.

  4. Create an organizational change management plan to communicate the organizational value, the need for resources, and the technical plan for the movement and eventual usage of data within the platform. Using OCM practices will help avoid surprises and inform people of your goals and progress. 

  5. Identify any ongoing projects that your CSDM transformation could impact. A large software implementation may strain resources, and the application owner may not be available to answer questions. The migration of existing service-related data could be disruptive if you have a compliance report to be delivered!

  6. Request a sandbox. Request a temporary sub-production instance from your account executive or determine an existing sub-production environment to be used. Data remediation should not occur in a production environment. 

  7. Plan on resourcing for two work streams: one for gathering and aligning data (CSDM data modeling) and another workstream for technical remediations. ServiceNow admins will be responsible for technical platform work activities. These workstreams can occur simultaneously. 

    Workstream 1 -  SWAT Team Activities - Determine your Services, Service Offerings, and related CMDB  Data 

  8. Set up regular meetings and use our provided tools: Regular meetings with your SWAT team will help you stay on track, complete your homework, and ask your CSDM consultant any questions that may arise. Your SWAT team can use these tools (available in NowCreate) to model your data outside the platform: 
    CSDM Workshop - Getting Started
    CSDM data modeling workbook - Use this workbook to build the needed import sets to import data into the platform.
    CSDM Data Model examples

  9. Activate and use Service Builder in your instance. Ensure resources are trained to create, maintain, and retire technical/business services and related offerings

  10. Use the CSDM Lifecycle standard: As part of your data gathering and modeling sessions, we recommend migrating to the CSDM life cycle standards. 

    Workstream 2 - Technical Activities -  Remediation Steps 

  11. Use Data Manager - to create and update policies to retire, archive, delete and attest CMDB Data. The immediate benefit is using the CMDB Data Manager to maintain your data in the CMDB and quickly identify issues with duplicate, stale and orphan CIs.

  12. Download CSDM and CMDB Data Foundations Dashboards: Your ServiceNow administrators and your contracted experts will need to assess the current state of your data and judge what data entities are of re-usable state and good quality. To accomplish this, download the CMDB/CSDM Data Foundations dashboard and turn on the scheduled jobs so that the metrics will populate the dashboard. The technical team should review and provide a report to the SWAT team.  Playbooks will assist with remediation!

    CSDM Data Foundation Dashboard.JPG

  13. Identify data tables and attributes: Review and assess any custom attributes. Is there an out-of-box attribute that works? If not, does the need for the custom attribute meet a business use case, for example, compliance reporting?  The CMDB and CSDM Data Foundation Dashboard has built in reports and playbooks that will help identify this data.

  14. Migrate data using these high-level data migration steps recommended by our product engineers. The first step is to back up your data by exporting data to an excel format.
    CSDM High Level Steps.JPG(image of high-level migration steps)

  15. Identify data dependencies:

    To make sure your data is organized correctly, you'll need to understand how it's all connected. If the data is rearranged and some of the tables that reports use are gone, things could go wrong. Use the script that was given to you to check the results with a group of experts. The script will help you see which reports, user interface commands, business rules, and other references are connected to a certain table. After you've looked at the results, come up with a plan to fix any problems you find. The script won't change your data or the things it's connected to. It's just there to help you understand how everything is connected.

  16. Perform data and attribute mapping: To change the way your CMDB data is organized, you'll need to export the data from the tables that were identified in the previous activity. Then, the technical team will put the data into new tables that follow the CSDM standards. They'll also make sure any custom tables and attributes are mapped to the new out-of-the-box tables. They'll also rearrange the custom attributes so they fit the new data structure. This will help make sure your CMDB data is organized in a way that makes sense and is easy to use.

  17. Use custom scripts to move data. Move data identified in the exercise above, especially data contained in any custom attributes or tables. For example, you can use a script to move data from the Applications table [cmdb_ci_appl] to the Application Service table [cmdb_ci_service_auto] or Business Applications table [cmdb_ci_business_appl. This example script will get you started:

     Example Script:

    var gr= newGlideRecord('cmdb_ci_appl');

    gr.addQuery('sys_class_name=cmdb_ci_appl');

    gr.query();

    while(gr.next()){

       var newName=gr.name+' - PROD'; gr.sys_class_name='cmdb_ci_service_auto';

       gr.name=newName;

       gr.update();

  18. Use import sets to upload the data gathered from the SWAT team: This is quicker and more efficient than manually entering and relating thousands of records. Apply CI Identification and Reconciliation to import sets to prevent duplicate records from being created in the CMDB/CSDM tables. 

  19. Configure Incident and Change management: Ensure the Incident and Change applications use the data-driven approach to the population of the assignment group.  The incident, Change, and Problem applications use a business rule to "Populate the Assignment Group based on CI or SO." Review and remediate any business rules, client scripts, and assignment lookup rules that may conflict with the data-driven approach to populating the assignment group from the service offering or CI record. We have found it helpful to code the service offering field to populate the referenced parent Service field and set it to read-only. Likewise, you can have the Service field cleared when the service offering field data has been cleared by modifying the client script "Clear Offering on changing Service."  Navigate to Incident Properties in the platform and select Yes under Incident Related List Properties

  20. Set up training and Plan a Go Live for all support teams and service owners and run mock scenarios on data entry and usage. Provide cheat sheets for your Service Desk employees, product, or service owners. 

    With these high-level steps, your organization can be ready to manage your products and services!

    Links and Resources:
    CSDM Overview
    CSDM Getting Started Workshop

    CSDM Whitepaper
    CMDB Data Manager
    CMDB Health Configuration
    Video – Data Foundations and CMDB Health Dashboard Review

Comments
girishs
Tera Explorer

Great article and well summarized!

Mary Vanatta1
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Thank you! Your feedback is appreciated. 

Mary Vanatta1
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Link to the Data Model Examples has been corrected. 

We will be updating the Now Create assets to new branding soon!

Don Conley
Tera Contributor

Great summary of the steps. One more thing we like to work with clients on for Incident and Problem is to realign their categories to make good use of the Service, Service Offerings, and CIs for classification and remove any redundant pieces from their existing categories.

Mary Vanatta1
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

Links to the newly branded assets have been updated. To be published soon.

CSDM Workshop - Getting Started 
CSDM Data Model Examples
CSDM Data Modeling Workbook



 

 

PaulSylo
Mega Sage
Mega Sage

this is a very nice article. I just started my CSDM journey,it is very useful/.

Ashupakasma
Tera Expert

Great Article on CSDM. As I am looking for something that should be in easy way for a long time and yes!!! Yes I found it here. It is very easy to understand and I can relate the things in CMDB-CSDM implementation phase. 

Arno Reintjens
Tera Contributor

Hi @Mary nice overview of the 19 steps đź¤”, step 4 and 7 seem the same, or do you have a hidden step somewhere?

Cheers,

Arno

Mary Vanatta1
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

@Arno  Thank you so much!  I can't tell you how many times we review we still miss something!  I removed the duplicate step and then listed  Data Manager as a seperate step.  I also added several links to some newer Now Create Content! 

Arno Reintjens
Tera Contributor

@Mary Vanatta1 Thanks!!

Could you check the link at point 10 (CSDM life cycle standards)? The link brings me to CSDM Data Modelling workbook, or is that intended...

Thanks,

Arno

Gaurav84
Tera Explorer

Excellent and compact content!

Version history
Last update:
‎02-21-2023 02:10 PM
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