Dirty CMDB? Clean it up!

Effective CMDB (Configuration Management Database) maintenance and management is crucial for maintaining the integrity and accuracy of IT infrastructure data. In ServiceNow, the CMDB is the foundation for various IT Service Management (ITSM) processes, such as incident, change, and problem management. However, over time, issues like duplicates, orphaned records, and stale records can creep into the CMDB, leading to inaccurate reporting, ineffective decision-making, and inefficient processes.

This blog post will cover best practices to prevent duplicates, orphans, and stale records from polluting your ServiceNow CMDB.

Implement Strong Data Governance Policies - Data governance is the backbone of a healthy CMDB. Establish clear policies and guidelines that define how data is captured, updated, and removed from the CMDB. These policies should cover areas such as:

• Data ownership: Assign responsibility for specific data sets to teams or individuals to ensure accountability.
• Standardization: Use consistent naming conventions, types, and attributes to avoid discrepancies and conflicts. Check problematic CMDB policies against OOB ServiceNow CMDB policies.
• Validation: Regularly audit data entries to ensure they adhere to governance policies.

By establishing and enforcing these rules, you reduce the risk of introducing duplicate, orphaned, or stale records into the CMDB.

Leverage ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping - ServiceNow's Discovery and Service Mapping tools are essential for maintaining an accurate CMDB:

• Discovery: Automatically identifies and populates CIs (Configuration Items) in your CMDB by scanning your network and identifying new assets or changes to existing ones.
• Service Mapping: Provides visibility into the relationships between applications and underlying infrastructure. This prevents orphaned CIs by ensuring every item is connected to a service or system.
• Other Discovery Sources and Integrations: Ensuring that other ServiceNow plugins or custom integrations utilize the CMDB IRE will help prevent duplicates and other data errors. Data should never be put directly into a CMDB data table without being passed through the IRE to help reconcile and correlate the data to existing CMDB records.

Regular use of Discovery and Service Mapping helps ensure that CIs remain current, accurate, and properly linked to the services they support.

Implement Deduplication Rules - Duplicate CIs can occur when multiple discovery tools or manual processes are used, resulting in records with the same Name or Serial Number. To prevent duplicates, define IRE reconciliation rules.

Schedule Regular Data Audits and Health Checks - Regular audits of your CMDB data are essential to maintaining its integrity. ServiceNow provides tools such as CMDB Health Dashboards, which include metrics like completeness, correctness, and compliance to identify potential issues. By scheduling periodic audits, you can catch issues like missing relationships or incorrect data before they become problematic.

Automate Aging and Stale CI Management - Stale records can accumulate when CIs are no longer in use but remain in the CMDB. This can occur when hardware is decommissioned, applications are retired, or devices are no longer connected to the network. To manage stale CIs, set lifecycle states, use the last scanned and updated fields, and create scheduled jobs to retire or archive stale CIs.

Maintain Relationships Between CIs - Orphaned CIs, which are records with no relationships to other CIs or services, can make it challenging to understand the impact of changes or issues within your infrastructure. To prevent orphans, you can ensure relationship mapping is functioning with your current integrations by using dependency views or create mandatory relationship rules.

Regularly Train Users and Stakeholders - Human error is a leading cause of CMDB issues. Providing regular training to users who interact with the CMDB is critical to preventing data corruption. Topics to cover include data entry best practices and governance policies. 

Conclusion

A well-maintained and managed CMDB is the key to accurate, actionable IT data. By following best practices such as implementing strong data governance, leveraging ServiceNow’s Discovery and Service Mapping tools, automating stale CI management, and performing regular audits, you can significantly reduce the occurrence of duplicates, orphans, and stale records. This results in a cleaner, more efficient CMDB that supports your organization’s IT service management goals. Contact our experienced team at RapDev for help with the health of your CMDB.

Looking to resolve CMDB issues or interested to learn more? Write to us at chat@rapdev.io.