CMDB

The Configuration Management Database, or CMDB, is a data repository that contains all
the assets and services managed by a company. This information includes servers, network
devices, applications, services, and more.

What Makes Up Your CMDB

The CMDB consists of three key components: Physical, Logical, and Conceptual.

 Physical components have a specific ___location—they take up space and can be seen
(e.g. servers, desktops).
 Logical components do not take up physical space but perform specific functions that
need physical components to operate (e.g. a database instance, corporate intranet,
subnet).
 Conceptual components are representations of physical and logical components that
have been combined to create a unique concept (e.g. a service, system,
environment, or zone).

Why CMDB Matters

In the simplest terms, a well-designed configuration management database, or CMDB,

provides the data needed to support a process. In a larger sense, it can help your
organization accomplish its strategic or tactical goals. So it’s important to keep the bigger
picture in mind when building your CMDB.

Here are three reasons why CMDB matters:

1. CMDB forms the core of your organization’s ServiceNow information engine.

2. In order to support the way your organization uses ServiceNow, your CMDB need
to be operationally prepared.
3. A solid CMDB foundation is necessary to take full advantage of the many
ServiceNow capabilities as your organization grows and matures into platform.

CMDB maturity crawl, walk, run and eventually, drive! Hang on, here we go.

CMDB Maturation Process

CRAWL:
  Control and management process strategy and planning
 Control and management processes
 CIs (Configuration Item) to support core processes

 Create an overview of your Business Applications and

Application Services
 Understand ownership and responsibilities for Business
Applications and Application Services
 Determine business criticality of Application Services
 Critical CIs first
 Expand

WALK:

 Inventory lifecycle management

 Manual service mapping

1. Create a Technical Services and Offerings overview

2. Understand ownership and responsibilities
3. Determine criticality
4. Link Technical Service Offerings to corresponding Application
Services
5. Identify and link critical CIs of Technical Service Offerings to
critical CIs of Critical Application Services

RUN:

 Automated Discovery
 IT Asset Management & Software Asset Management
  Involve business users and service owners
 Define SLAs and subscription methods
 Identify and select business services
 Define your business services (your offering)
 Close the GAP (relate/depend business to IT)
 Expand

DRIVE:

 Event management
 Automated service mapping

 Identify use cases/services for DRIVE(FLY) phase

 Service Catalog
 Define Business Capabilities
 Link Business Capabilities with Business Applications and
Business Services
 Relate Information Objects to Business Applications

5 Steps to a Healthy CMDB

1. Define the Process

Define the CMDB Process Owner:

There should always be a key representative for the CMDB as a whole. This person will need
to look at the CMDB from all angles and work closely with your leadership to ensure support
for the CMDB.

Define Owners for each CI Class:

Each CI Class owner will own the process for their specific CI (Change Incident) and will be
responsible to prove the value of their CI(s) going into the CMDB, then manage data related
to their Class.

Define the members of the Configuration Control Board (CCB):

As the governing body of the CMDB, the board will also identify the need for a new class,
attribute or relationship. Your CCB should also include the CMDB Process Owner/Manager in
order to ensure the design, configuration and health of the CMDB remains consistent.

To prepare your CMDB, ask yourself:

  Which classes of Change Incident (CI) do I need in my CMDB, and why?
 Who should own the CI classes, and why?
 Which data/attributes are important for these classes, and why?
 Which relationships do I need to know about, and why?
 Which processes and capabilities does my CMDB need to support?

2. Prioritize CI Class & Value

You’ll need to work with the CCB (remember: Configuration Control Board) to evaluate top
Classes and their associated values.

Be sure to align these Classes to your organization’s business objectives. Begin by targeting
high-volume/value wins.

Again, include Leadership on these conversations to ensure buy-in and backing. Leadership,
in turn, should communicate accountability.

3. Establish Attributes and Design

A well-designed CMDB provides the data needed to support a process and will help your
organization achieve its strategic and tactical objectives.

Note that “well designed” is the key phrase above. You’ll need to push back whenever you
hear things like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Don’t be tempted. Your break room refrigerator
doesn’t really need an IP address. Also maintain skepticism if a process owner cannot tell
you why an attribute is important.

A healthy CMDB is underpinned by shared accountability for data quality.

4. Configuration, Discovery & Relationship Mapping

 Identify OOB classes that fit your design and modify as appropriate.
 Create new classes if they don’t exist but be careful (ServiceNow New York expands
into a Common Service Data Model).
 Make your CMDB consumable: Simplify lists, forms, and reports to present your
design consistently.
 Choose the right data sources for the job: ServiceNow supports multiple data
sources, so you’ll need to select the right one for your design and process objectives.
The CMDB can Consume Data from Multiple Sources

You’ll need to determine the primary data source, whether that’s via Discovery, third-party
source, or manually.

Only use a non-manual data source if you can trust that the data being ingested is reliable.
Do not pull in data that you plan to clean once it’s in the CMDB!
Develop Reconciliation Rules to ensure that the right source is used for each attribute. Also
develop Precedence Rules for any overlapping Reconciliation Rules.

Tips to tune Discovery to match your design:

 Only discover or create CIs for things in your design

 Schedule based on frequency of required updates

5. Monitor & Mantain

Process Owners and Managers are responsible for monitoring metrics, which means you’ll
need to evaluate KPIs and adjust when necessary.

KPIs are often defined early in a process and then the process is forced to adhere. This is not
necessarily correct when you have organizational targets that are constantly being adjusted.

Your CMDB is only as good as the data that it contains, so here are a few ways to ensure it
remains sound:

Completeness

 Required Data: Include everything that you need to know about CIs and relationships
 Recommended Data: Nice-to-have information about CIs and relationships
 Use Data Certification for manually maintained CIs
 Review and verify any automated attribute updates (determine patterns)

Correctness

 No Duplicates Exist: Every CI and relationship should appear only once

 Information is not Stale: CI and relationship data has been updated adhering to the
process schedule
 No Orphans Exist: Class and relationships are present for each CI

Compliance

 Data Standards and Compliance: CIs are created with the right data
 Audit: Continuously validate that completeness and correctness standards are being
met

How Cask Helps Get Your CMDB in Shape

Successful digital transformation starts with a strategic plan for your Configuration
Management Database.
Cask can also help you identify gaps between your current state and CMDB best practices
with a CI health assessment that analyzes your organization’s configuration management
process and governance systems.

CMDB Strategic Compass Framework

Phase 1:

 Conduct analysis of the configuration management process and governance to

identify gaps between the current state and best practices
 Review use cases to understand what information is needed and why
 Analyze CMDB data for alignment with use cases
 Review data sources and sources of truth and associated reconciliation methods
 Analysis of data, structures and CI health

Phase 2:

 Vision and strategic alignment with key stakeholders

 Build roadmap to support vision
 Assemble findings and organize recommendations

Objectives

 Explore IT challenges in modern enterprises fueled by technology

 Describe the CMDB and the attributes that provide enterprise-wide visibility

 Review terminology leveraged to describe the CMDB on the NOW Platform

 Describe the configuration management capabilities enhanced by the CMDB

 Identify stakeholders and their unique roles

Standardized
–

ServiceNow CMDB utilizes a single data model, with common processes, standard
taxonomy, and pre-negotiated semantics, format, and quality standards for
exchanged data.

Single System of Record

–

As a result, every table, view, and application built on the Now Platform leverages a
consolidated, single system of record.

Extendable
–

This data model is also easily extensible: base system tables and views can be extended
easily; fields from other tables can be referenced and used to drive workflow; and data
validation and normalization rules ensure that trusted data can be leveraged across any
application, form, or workflow.

Configuration Item (CI)

Physical and logical components of an infrastructure that needs to be managed to deliver a
product or service and are currently, or soon will be, under configuration management. For
example, a network device, a server, an application, a delivery truck, or service.
Attributes

Information that further describes a CI such as a name, serial number, manufacturer,

operating system.
Relationship Type
Include the relationships between configuration items. For example, a web application
might read data from a specific database, which in turn might depend on a piece of
underlying hardware.
Class
Describes a table that contains and represents a specific type or group of CIs that share
common attributes such as a Windows Server, Linux Server, Printer, Virtual Machine,
Vehicle, Animal etc.
Configuration Management System (CMS)
A set of tools and databases that are used to manage an organizations configuration data.
Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
A database used to store configuration records throughout their Lifecycle. The Configuration
Management System maintains one or more CMDBs, and each CMDB stores attributes of
CIs, and Relationships with other CIs.
Base Table
The core Configuration Item [cmdb_ci] table, which stores the basic attributes of all the CIs.
All configuration item classes extend from this table including all hardware and applications.
CI Reclassification
Is a CI whose class has been upgraded, downgraded, or switched. An example of an
upgraded CI is a Server record that was upgraded from the Server [cmdb_ci_server] class to
the Windows Server [cmdb_ci_win_server] class.

CI Class Upgrade
The CI class is updated to a class that is less generic in the class hierarchy, and the newly
assigned class has additional attributes. For example, an upgrade occurs if a CI is moved
from the Server [cmdb_ci_server] class to the Windows Server [cmdb_ci_win_server] class.
CI Class Downgrade
The CI class is updated to a class that is more generic in the class hierarchy, and the newly
assigned class has less attributes. For example, a downgrade occurs if a CI is moved from the
Windows Server [cmdb_ci_win_server] class to the Server [cmdb_ci_server] class.
CI Class Switch
The CI class is in a different branch in the class hierarchy and has a different set of attributes
than the current class. For example, reclassifying a CI from the Linux Server
[cmdb_ci_linux_server] class to the Windows Server [cmdb_ci_win_server] class.

Parent and Child Class

A table that extends another table is called a child class, and the table it extends is the
parent class. A table can be both a parent and child class both extending and providing
extensions for other tables. For example, the Server table extends the Computer table and
the Windows Server table extends the Server table, thus making the Server table both a
Parent and Child class.
Asset vs. CI
On the Now platform, when creating a hardware asset, a corresponding CI will be
automatically created or when a CI is discovered for the first time and inserted into the
CMDB, a corresponding asset record will be automatically created. The asset and the CI is
connected through out the CI/Asset lifecycle.
Asset:

 Often starts during the procurement process, but may be created when a discovery
tool finds the CI for the first time
 Is part of the financial lifecycle

Configuration
Item (CI):

 Often starts when a discovery tool finds the CI for the first time, but may be created
during the procurement process
 Is part of the technical operations

Asset DB vs. CMDB

 Asset DB is inventory + financial data

 CMDB is inventory + relationships

CMDB vs. Authoritative Sources

The CMDB is the authoritative source of some information:

 Support group
 Contact
 Owner

The CMDB is not the authoritative source of all information:

 Contents of all server and application configuration files

 Server log files

Common Services Data Model (CSDM)

Represents a standard and shared set of service related definitions across ServiceNow
products and the NOW platform that enables and supports true service level reporting while
providing prescriptive guidance on service modeling within the CMDB. These service-related
definitions span the ServiceNow® product portfolio and the Now Platform®.
Application Service
A set of interconnected applications and hosts which are configured to offer a service to the
organization. Application services can be internal, like an organization email system or
customer-facing, like an organization website.
Application
Applications that comprise an application service as configuration items (CIs). The various
Applications and the relationships between them, that comprise an application service, are
stored in the CMDB. (i.e. Tomcat, Apache, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, IIS).
DevOps
Consists of developers who build applications and the operations groups who deploy and
maintain them within an enterprise. In a DevOps environment, these two groups are
combined into one in order to work more effectively together to accelerate and improve
service delivery.

Data Population

The CMDB allows for accurate data acquisition through:

 Agent-less auto-discovery of known and unknown CIs
 Existing integrations to third party data sources
 Additional integrations using web services or other methods
Built-in data reconciliation and normalization features ensure consistently accurate and
useful data.

Typical integrations to the ServiceNow CMDB

ServiceNow Discovery can be implemented to easily and accurately populate and maintain
the CMDB with CI data that is constantly being rediscovered and refreshed in the CMDB.
Fully integrated and agent-less, ServiceNow Discovery automatically identifies the type of CI
it is interacting with and then launches additional probes, sensors, and patterns that are
appropriate to that device to gather further information and attributes.

ServiceNow Service Mapping overlays service maps onto existing

configuration data to connect CIs underlying a given service, making the CMDB
service aware.
The CMDB also integrates with the most common infrastructure
platforms such as VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center Configuration
Manager, and Google Cloud Platform as well as endpoint management products.

Additionally, data may be imported into the CMDB through IntegrationHub ETL (a
ServiceNow Store application), import sets, web services, direct
database imports, and Excel files. Transform maps, the Identification and Reconciliation
Engine, and business rules enable inbound data to be mapped to target tables and fields,
transformed, merged, and coalesced.

The CMDB leverages the NOW Platform features such as the Identification and
Reconciliation Engine (IRE) and field normalization to automatically check uniqueness of a
CI. Reconciliation Rules allow only authorized data sources to update specific CI classes,
normalizes the data, and then loads the data into the CMDB to ensure the most recent and
accurate profile of that CI.

Maps provide visualization of CMDB relationships

Service Aware CMDB

ServiceNow's Service Mapping technology discovers and provides a clear, graphical view of
complex IT infrastructure and service relationships. IT professionals can click through the
service map, filtering data, focusing in on specific CIs, and viewing impact and risk alongside
in-flight operational activities such as incident, problem, and change requests.
Administrators, system owners, and service owners can quickly identify configuration drift,
unplanned changes, and incident history to understand the health of CIs they are
responsible for and the operational activities directly or indirectly impacting those CIs.

Common Services Data Model Overview

The Common Services Data Model (CSDM) represents a standard and shared set of service
related definitions across the ServiceNow products and platform. The CSDM enables and
supports true service level reporting, while providing prescriptive guidance on service
modeling within the CMDB. These service-related definitions span the ServiceNow product
portfolio and the Now Platform. Click the plus sign on each ___domain to learn more.

Design Domain
The Common Service Data Model is broken up into three domains. The first ___domain is
design. In this ___domain we identify the tables related to business capability, business
application, and the new (New York release) information object. These tables were
popularized as part of the APM product line and enables capabilities related to the
understating of your business applications from the inventory and portfolio perspective. You
can look at your business applications from a capability perspective and identify and
rationalized where you have too much or too little spend related to the capabilities you wish
to provide. The business applications enable you to identify the metadata about your
applications, including in New York the new table information object, which is related to
your business application. For those areas where you need to identify where you have
compliance related data, such as PII or PCI, that information came out within the
information object table related to the business application. Where data exists, we can
relate that information object to the exact database instances where the data resides.
Manage Technical Services
Within the Manage Technical Services area we identify one of the most critical elements of
the Common Services Data Model, which is the application service. Consider the application
service to be the implementations of your business application. You will notice a lot of lines
coming to or going from the application service. This particular table becomes the glue that
ties many of the elements of the common services data model together. That
implementation of your business application or application service can be done in many
ways. We could break it up by environment – Dev, QA, and Prod. We could break it up by
geography - North America prod vs EMEA prod, etc. Those become a representation of
what's actually been implemented. If you have products like ServiceNow Service Mapping,
we can identify all the configuration items that make up the implementation of that
application service. ServiceNow Discovery can identify all the pieces and parts from server
and networking equipment and the applications that reside on it. You’ll notice an
application table here identified that has existed since the dawn of ServiceNow in the
CMDB. It is meant for those discoverable elements that are in code running on hosts. You’ll
often find their names to be something similar to the name of an application, an @ symbol,
and the name of the host because it's pertaining to specific code found and running on a
specific host. Database instances are an example of an application. Next, you'll see
representations of technical service and technical service offerings. These are the groups
that provide for and manage these technologies that exist for the business to consume. In
essence the Manage Technical Services is an area that identifies what is provided from a
technical perspective so that the business can consume.
Sell / Consume
The next ___domain is the Sell/Consume. As identified from the technical service as being
provided, the Sell/Consume is the business that then consumes what the technology experts
provide. These identify the exact elements that the business exists to perform as a business,
and are identified in multiple tables, including the Business Service offering, Business
Service, and (new for the New York release), Business Service Portfolio. The Business Service
Portfolio is not a CMDB CI table but it is identified to provide the hierarchy of the service
related objects. You’ll also note brand new in the New York release, the ability to request
from the request catalog a service offering.

The data model is a CMDB framework across our products and platform that will enable and
support multiple configuration strategies. The CSDM includes best practices related to the
proper modeling of data using base system tables and relationships. Many ServiceNow
products have a dependency on data within this data model.
Common Service: A standard and shared set of service related definitions across our
products and platform that will enable and support true service level reporting.

Data Model: A CMDB Framework across our products and platform that will enable
and support multiple configuration strategies.

 Basic Info:The Basic Info tab provides a place to view or configure

basic details such as a Display Name, Table Name, setting the
Extensible flag, and associating an Icon to the class.

 Attributes: It allows you to view or to create new class attributes.

 Identification Rule: It used in the identification and reconciliation
process to uniquely identify CIs. This tab by default displays the
derived identification rule from the parent class as well as any
defined identification entries.

 Dependent Relationship: Create hosting and dependent

relationship rules for CI classes to help with correctly identifying
dependent CIs during the discovery and service mapping process.

 Reconciliation Rule: It is a process of reconciling CIs and CI

attributes by allowing only designated authoritative data sources the
ability to update the CMDB at the CI table and attribute level
Provides the components for specifying the data sources that are authorized
to update CI attributes. If there is more than one authorized data source,
users will also create a data precedence rule.

Note: reconciliation rules do not apply to the creation of records as any data
source can create a CMDB record.

Setting reconciliation rules prevents the flip flopping of various data sources
updating each other’s values.

Data Precedence Rules: Defines the priority across multiple data sources if
more than one is authorized to edit the same CI attributes.

Data Refresh Rules: Defines the frequency that authorized data sources
should update CI attributes.

1. Suggested Relationship: Suggested relationships are built to help

the user decide which relationships are reasonable when building
relationships for the class being defined.
For Example:

Allocated from :: Allocated to

Exports to :: Imports from

1. Health: Health metrics such as duplicate CIs, required CI fields, and

audits contribute to the calculation of the overall health scorecards
at the specific CI class or base CMDB level.
The health of the CMDB data is monitored and reported for the following KPIs,

1. Completeness: CIs are tested for required and recommended fields

that are not populated.
2. Compliance: The CMDB data is audited for adherence to pre-
defined certificates.
3. Correctness: CIs are tested against pre-defined data integrity rules
such as identification rules (to detect duplicate CIs), orphan CI rules,
and stale CI rules.

 CI List: The CI list displays all defined CIs for the selected class.

 Pinned Class: Pinning classes provide an easy way to navigate to

the classes you use the most. Clicking on the “Pin” displays the
pinned classes. Clicking on any of the displayed classes takes you
to the settings for that class.