CMBD health assessment methodology

ITAM Tools
1

Hello all, I am a newly invested IT Asset Manager at a US university that implemented ServiceNow CMDB about 2 years ago with very little customization or oversight, and it is in an “untamed” state. I am trying to perform an assessment and remediate any outstanding major issues relating to the CMDB performance. I’d like to get your suggestions on how to approach the CMDB assessment.

What I have come up with so far is this approach:

  1. Assess CMDB Technical Health: Using ServiceNow built-in platform functionality to test Configuration Item records for completeness, correctness, compliance, and relationships.
  2. Evaluate Discovery: This includes the scope (meaning what device classes are being discovered and what device info we collect), schedules, behaviors (discovery probes, mid servers, the orchestration of discovery components), and credentials.
  3. Evaluate integration sources: Primarily SCCM (which I know is an active integration), but also including other integrations (either via a ServiceNow integration or API) that I don’t yet know about and evaluating the impact of the one-time manual imports that have been done over time.
  4. Evaluate ServiceNow platform configuration relating to the CMDB. This includes ServiceNow’s identification and reconciliation rules (that determines which data sources can update CI attributes), orders of precedence, and Asset CI field mapping.

A little more info. There has been significant institutional knowledge lost: The previous person in this role, and indeed the entire ITAM staff, are no longer with the organization and left behind only scattered incomplete records. Additionally, the ServiceNow architect/admin who was the lead for Configuration/Asset is no longer part of the organization. So, I cannot just go ask people these questions - I really have to perform a base assessment myself. Finally, the guidance I’ve been given is to just do an “MVP” effort at CMDB remediation - so I want to only address the major impacts to performance/health now and log minor impacts for later resolution.

How would YOU go about this? Are there things in my approach you would add to, remove, or do differently? In particular, #1 above is straightforward, but the others are not - so any guidance you might have would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Dan

1 Like
2

I believe you already understood and have identified the outstanding major issues relating to the CMDB performance. I would suggest listing them and identify the solution to each potentially such as assessing the CMDB Technical Health through the ServiceNow built-in CMDB health check feature; hopefully you have identified issues that affects the CMDB completeness, correctness, compliance, etc.

1 Like
3

Thank you @tangcov, I appreciate the feedback.

1 Like