CMDB Health Dashboard Disabled - Product Knowledge

CMDB Health Dashboard Disabled  Get Well Playbook

CMDB Health Dashboard Disabled

A Step by Step Guide to enable the dashboard

Table of Contents

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

Audience

Problem Overview

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

How this playbook is structured

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Downstream Consequences

Impact on Your Business

Engagement Questions

Remediation Plays

Summary

Play 1: Analyze your current state

Play 2: Fix Play

Data Governance

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

The goal of this playbook is to identify and enable the CMDB Health Dashboard jobs.

Details about this playbook

Author John Walker (Johnny) Date 08/10/2020 Addresses HSD # HSD0001712 Applicable ServiceNow Releases All Releases Time required less than 1 hour Audience

Configuration Manager or Configuration Management team - (admin role required)

ServiceNow Admin or Discovery Admin Problem Overview

If the CMDB Health Jobs are not enabled, the provided dashboard for CMDB Health will lack all information related to correctness, completeness and compliance. Without this vital tool for Data Governance, your CMDB will struggle to support all of the platform applications which depend on it.

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

Accuracy within the CMDB will directly contribute to success and value in the many applications making use of it (which is most of them)

Data Governance for the CMDB is provided by this built-in dashboard and the data gathering jobs which enable it

Process alignment can be measured by knowing where the gaps are within your CMDB classes

Any plans to implement ITOM Visibility, Optimization or Health should all begin with this simple playbook to enable the CMDB Health Dashboard

Many other CMDB Get Well Playbooks will reference making use of this dashboard

How this playbook is structured

This Playbook is structured to guide you through four plays.

The first play is to validate if any of the CMDB Health Jobs are not enabled

(optional – choose one) The second play guides you through manually enabling the CMDB Health jobs

(optional – choose one) The third play is a script to enable the CMDB Health jobs

The fourth play is related to governance Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Lack of a clearly designated Owner for the CMDB

Lack of awareness about the value provided by the CMDB Health Dashboard

The CMDB Health jobs are disabled by default so that metrics are not actively collected until the CMDB is considered “live”

Someone may have decided that there are so many outstanding issues within the CMDB that the dashboard “wasn’t showing a positive message”

While the CMDB Dashboard was providing insight as to what was missing, incomplete or incorrect within the CMDB, where was not adequate time allocated to do anything about it

Lack of step-by-step directions to remediate issues within the CMDB led to a decision to disable the CMDB Health Dashboard

Downstream Consequences

Data Consequence

If the CMDB Health Dashboard is not enabled, the three main areas of concern, Completeness, Correctness and Compliance, are all data issues within the CMDB going without governance Operation Consequence

Without the CMDB Health Dashboard, the configuration management team might spend unnecessary time creating, maintaining and working customized processes to validate, maintain and support their CMDB App Consequence

Without the CMDB Health Dashboard to govern issues such as lack of Completeness, Correctness and Compliance, there can be many inconsistent behaviors within Discovery, Service Mapping, Event Management, Asset Management, Hardware Lifecycle, Portfolio Management, Incident, Problem, Change, Vulnerability Response and others Impact on Your Business

Lower MTTR

Data Validation and Completeness

When teams like the Service Desk aren’t dealing with inaccurate data, the time and effort required to triage and resolve Incidents will be lower Increase Operational Visibility

Service Awareness

The governance provided by the CMDB Health Dashboard will ensure that accurate information is always just a click away from the decision makers

A healthy CMDB will lend itself directly to the ability to manage events taking place within your infrastructure, events which impact delivery of services across the board Audit / Compliance

Data Governance

The CMDB Health Dashboard is the source of record for Data Governance within your CMDB There are certification filters available within the compliance area of the dashboard which will enable you to define a desired state for configuration items within a given class

Process Gap Detection

The CMDB Health Dashboard plays a vital role in ensuring compliance with any process related to Asset Management, Procurement, software licensing and more

System Integrity

Accuracy within all the records of the CMDB will contribute strongly to ensuring that all platform applications can function within normal, expected parameters Process Automation

Digital Workflows

Attempts to make use of digital workflows to support daily operations will be far simpler when foundational health has been restored to the CMDB Better User Experience

Platform Awareness & Adoption

Users will accept and adopt the CMDB (as well as the platform as a whole) when they know they can trust the quality of data they are presented with during daily operations

Engagement Questions:

Consider the answers to these questions:

Is there an Owner defined for the CMDB?

Are there any Configuration Management analysts working with the CMDB Owner to ensure Correctness, Completeness and Compliance within the CMDB?

Have the CMDB Health jobs ever been enabled? If so, why were they later disabled?

Has anyone worked with your configuration management team to help them understand the value of CMDB Health Dashboard?

Remediation Plays

Summary

The table below lists and summarizes each of the remediation plays in the playbook. Details are included later.

Play Name

Analyze Play

What this play is about

Query to determine which CMDB Health Dashboard jobs are disabled

Required tasks

Run query script Fix Plays

What this play is about

Manually enable CMDB Health jobs Required tasks

Navigate to the jobs and set them active Data Governance

What this play is about

Helps you establish standard operating procedures, as well as periodic data certification Required tasks

Guidance related to using the CMDB Health Dashboard

Play 1 - Analyze your current state

What this Play is about

Determine if any of the CMDB Health Jobs are disabled

Required tasks

Navigate to System Definition > Scheduled Jobs and search for Name starts with 'CMDB Health Dashboard'.

Example: Note any of the five jobs here where Active is not set to 'true'.

Proceed to the next play to remediate.

Play 2: Fix Play

What this Play is about

All five CMDB Health Dashboard jobs need to be enabled for your CMDB Dashboard to be fully populated.

Required tasks

(Optional – choose one) To manually enable and later configure the CMDB Health Dashboard jobs, follow the instructions on this page or

(Optional – choose one) Use this Fix Script to automatically enable all of the jobs. Data Governance

What is this Play about ?

Guidance for CMDB Health Dashboard usage to ensure CMDB health

Guidance

Use ServiceNow out-of-the-box as much as possible

Avoid adding custom fields within the CMDB without a compelling business reason to do so

Be careful when setting CMDB fields to Mandatory as this can prevent users from performing record updates - instead consider using recommended for fields like 'Assigned to' and 'Location'

Whenever possible, make use of Discovery to populate the CMDB

When integrating with third party discovery sources, be sure to leverage the Identification and Reconciliation Engine

If key identification criteria on records (like Serial Number) is missing, care should be taken to get that information collected and input as soon as possible Congratulations You have completed this Get Well Playbook.