How do I use the CMDB health dashboard?

The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) health dashboard aggregates key performance metrics and offers
actionable insights that enable you to monitor and improve the performance and health of your CMDB.
Questions addressed:
You can find the dashboard by
Why use the CMDB health dashboard?
Page 1: searching for “CMDB Dashboard” in
the application menu.
• What is the CMDB • CMDB health is critical to success – A well-configured CMDB can save you as
health dashboard? much as 40% in IT costs and is critical to avoiding unplanned outages. Data
quality in the CMDB is an essential goal of any IT organization.
• Why use the CMDB
health dashboard?
• Proactive issue management – The dashboard enables you to proactively
manage your CMDB/configuration items (CI) and identify issues, improve the
Page 2: CMDB’s accuracy and usability, and act upon any issues before they
become more severe risks to your operational environment.
• What metrics does
the dashboard
track to assess • Stakeholder transparency – The dashboard makes the overall health of your
CMDB health? CMDB visible to key stakeholders, enabling you to share status updates, track
SLAs, and keep everyone aligned on key issues or success.
• How do I use the
dashboard to
improve CMDB
health? Related resources
• CMDB and Discovery deployment
Page 3: • Populate and maintain your CMDB with Discovery
• Success Checklist – Plan your architecture, instances, integrations, and data flows
• What are the best
• Success Checklist – Discover and map your service assets
practices for setting
up the health • Community Blog – Determine CMDB Health with the CMDB Dashboard If you have any questions on this topic or
dashboard? you would like to be a contributor to
• CMDB Overview
future ServiceNow best practice content,
• Ask the Expert – CMDB Basics Webinar please contact us.

1 © 2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How do I use the CMDB health dashboard?(Continued)
What metrics does the dashboard track to assess CMDB health?

KPI category Description Question answered Examples

Test for required and recommended fields that are Do you have all the • CI owner (assigned to)
Completeness
not populated. information you need? • Cost center
Audit the CMDB for its adherence to predefined
Is the data doing what you • Workstations have anti-virus installed
Compliance regulatory requirements, internal governance, and
need the CIs to be doing? • Production servers have a QA server
certificates.
Test against predefined data integrity rules such as • Duplicates
Is the data up to date and
Correctness identification rules, orphan CI rules, and stale CI • Server CIs not related to a service
accurate?
rules. • CIs that exists in the CMDB but not on the network

How do I use the dashboard to improve CMDB health?

Drive resolution for compliance failures Proactively address top Track health over time
offenders

2 © 2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How do I use the CMDB health dashboard?(Continued)
What are the best practices for setting up the health dashboard?

Configure inclusion rules Determine required and recommended fields

Inclusion rules filter the CIs included in the dashboard. To avoid noise in Limit the number of required fields, and use required fields that are
the data, limit the CIs included to those classes that are necessary to automatically populated (e.g., using Discovery or SCCM). Limiting the
achieving your outcomes. number of required fields reduces the risk that CIs identified through
Discovery will be blocked.
Recommended CI classes for inclusion:
As required, fields are mandatory across all areas of the CMDB while
• Applications
recommended fields only impact health metrics, use recommended
• Servers (optionally change to computers)
fields to inform health metrics without impacting other processes and
• Virtual machines (VMWare, AWS, etc.)
to test potential future required fields.
• Network gear (routers, switches, etc.)

Create staleness rules Determine orphan rules

Health staleness rules help keep your CMDB up to date and accurate, When creating orphan rules (CIs missing a defined relationship within
since most infrastructure and application environments change the CMDB), consider your application stack and what relationships are
rapidly. Out of the box, everything has a 60-day limit before becoming most important to troubleshooting an issue and keeping your CMDB
stale, but you can set limits by asset class. Adjust the staleness rules by complete.
considering how often you’re discovering these classes and if classes
depend on external sources.
Recommended orphan rules:
For example: • Applications should be related to a server
• Virtual servers should be related to virtual machines
• Servers are discovered weekly and have a 21-day limit
• VMs should be related to a hypervisor (ESX, AWS)
• PCs are imported monthly and have a 60-day limit
• WebSphere servers should contain an enterprise application
archive (EAR) file

3 © 2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All Rights Reserved.