Manage Custom State Values Present in Asset Lifecycle Stages - Product Knowledge

Manage Custom State Values Present in Asset Lifecycle Stages  Product Success Playbook

Manage Custom State Values Present in Asset Lifecycle Stages

A step-by-step guide to analyze and remediate custom state values used in asset lifecycle stages

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: Review your data

Play 2: Analyze your Asset and CI records

Play 3: Fix Play

Data Governance

References

Summary

Goal of this Playbook

The goal of this playbook is to identify and manage custom hardware asset state (alm_asset.install_status) and configuration item status (cmdb_ci.install_status)values created for managing asset lifecycle stages.

Details about this playbook

Author Bibu Elias Punnachalil Reviewer Daniel W. Slocum Date 11/15/2021 Addresses HSD # HSD0010489 Applicable ServiceNow Releases All Releases Time Required Approximately 1 to 8 hours (depending on your environment) Audience

Asset Manager and Asset Management Team Configuration Manager or Configuration Management team ServiceNow Administrator or Discovery Administrator

Problem Overview

Correctly identifying the lifecycle stage of an asset is a critical component of maintaining and managing the financial impact of an asset and its related Configuration Item have on a business. Asset lifecycle stages are captured in the Asset record’s State and Substate attributes when a user or an automated process selects a state and substate from one of the available choice list values defined in the ServiceNow instance. As ServiceNow is a highly configurable platform, customizations to the State and Substate choice lists are simple to perform but the consequences of making those customizations are not always readily apparent. Modifications to the out of box values or the creation of new State and Substate values may impact Asset Management Database (AMDB) and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) workflows and other dependent processes and can preclude visibility of new values added to the product as ServiceNow releases new functionality. This playbook helps you identify if custom State and Substate values exist on asset lifecycle stages and helps in correcting them when appropriate.

Executive Summary

How this playbook can help you achieve business goals

Keeping baseline asset lifecycle stages help to:

Improve asset lifecycle tracking Improve operational visibility of assets Reduce operational costs by increasing asset data accuracy Reduce conflicts when deploying family and patch release ServiceNow upgrades How this playbook is structured

This playbook guides you through three plays. The first play (a review play) helps you identify the custom status values and associated assets The second play (an analysis play) helps you to analyze and understand the cause and impact of the identified custom status The third play (a fix play) explains the steps to remove any custom status values The fourth play (a governance play) explains the way you can monitor and keep the baseline asset lifecycle stage choice list

Problem Analysis

Upstream Causes

Transforms are loading custom status choices that do not exist as base choices provided by ServiceNow A ServiceNow Admin may have manually added new choices in the attribute’s choice list based on a business requirement which ServiceNow baseline choices did not support An update to the out of box Label of an existing status choice may have been made modifying the original intent of a ServiceNow provided choice An Admin may have manually changed the SQL Value of an existing status choice resulting in unavailability of the out of box choice to workflow automation Some custom choices within State and Substate choice lists are not life cycle values and should live outside of the status choice list Integrations to 3rd party solutions may create custom State and Substate choices that do not exist as baseline choices provided by ServiceNow You may not be aware that customizations in status attributes may have an adverse affect on capabilities within the platform Processes may not exist to identify and review customizations to State and Substate attributes within the CMDB Note: New custom choices are sometimes necessary, but any custom choices that are not utilized should be decommissioned. New custom choices should have SQL values that are well out of conflict with out of box values. For example, in the Rome release, out of box Asset State (install_status) choice values are numeric ranging from one to eleven. Custom values, if numeric, should start at a very high number to avoid conflict with ServiceNow’s development of new values or they should be textual.

Downstream Consequences

Data Consequence

Data conflict with out of box values may result in inaccurate data in the AMDB and the CMDB Data alignment between status attributes may result in inaccurate data in the AMDB or the CMDB Synchronization rules that maintain lifecycle stage data between Asset and CI records may not be created or updated to reflect custom values resulting in related Asset and CI records reflecting different lifecycle stages Operation Consequence

Policies that update status choices may be unaware of custom values resulting in broken workflows Reporting will lack correct data, unable to associate the correct status of a configuration item Inaccurate data used to make business decisions can result in incorrect business decisions App Consequence

Configuration items may not reflect appropriate operational status for inclusion / exclusion within various workflows Procurement process may not receive accurate input from Asset management

Impact on Your Business

Having custom values in asset lifecycle stage may result in,

• Reduced Operational Visibility ○ Process Alignment ○ Lifecycle Management ○ Inaccurate inputs into strategic decision management processes

• Audit/Compliance Issues ○ System Integrity ○ Data Governance ○ Process Gaps

• Increased Operational Cost ○ Asset Retirement gaps ○ Procurement accuracy

• Process Automation Difficulty ○ Baseline automation failure

Engagement Questions:

Consider the answers to these questions:

Is the instance using the Asset plugin, the Hardware Asset Management application, SAM Foundation, or the Software Asset Management application? Each of these plugins and applications share the alm_asset table and thus share the State and Substate attributes. Modifications or additions to the choice lists supporting the attributes can have impacts to the functionality of plugins and applications where the value is not relevant. Is the customer planning to or in the process of adopting CSDM ? Adoption of the CSDM will migrate customers from the long-used State and Substate attributes to new attributes reflecting the standardized lifecycle aligning to the CSDM. Modifications to the out of box State and Subtate values will complicate migration efforts. Are customizations reviewed during development process? Remediation Plays

Summary

The table below lists and summarizes each of the remediation plays in the playbook.

Play Name

Review your data

What this play is about

Query and Analyze existing custom asset State values in your instance Required tasks

Download and execute the script Analyze Play

What this play is about

Analyze and document list of custom asset lifecycle states

Required tasks

Analyze and document list of custom asset lifecycle states Fix Plays

What this play is about

Revert customizations Required tasks

Correct custom state choices where appropriate Data Governance

What this play is about

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

Provides advice, best practices and configuration audit instructions

Play 1 - Review your data

What this Play is about

This play helps you see if there are any custom state values deviating from baseline

This play includes running a fix script with three output sections. The first section provides a count of custom state values in asset records. The second section provides the list of all custom States. The third section provides the number of asset records using each of the custom states.

Required tasks

Download and import the Query - Custom Asset Lifecycle Status fix script Run the Fix script Upon successful completion, review the output from the query

Note contents of the actual output will be different, but sample output is shown below:

Play 2 - Analyze your CI records

What this Play is about

This play provides the steps to analyze the information returned by the script in the previous step,

Required tasks

Identify asset data stakeholders. A team or individual should ultimately be responsible for maintaining asset lifecycle data. This team or individual will often be among stakeholders who consume asset data. Present custom values to stakeholders to identify if custom values are required to run the business. If stakeholders cannot be identified, or more importantly, if individuals or teams cannot be identified who are actively using the data, or if there are no assets with a custom State or Substate, the custom attribute is a strong candidate for removal (not remediation).

Is the data used for a business critical process? While the information captured in the custom status may have an identified owner, often the status additions were to support a legacy business process. Identifying the business value that a particular custom status delivers is an important factor in determining if the status should be retained. If the status population is done simply because “we've always done it this way” or because it is to maintain historical trend data that otherwise has no current value, then that status is also a candidate for removal.

Is there overlap between a custom value and new out of box base values? A custom State or Substate may have been created for good reason: it filled a gap between business need and out of box functionality. However, with the rapid evolution of the ServiceNow platform, new functionalities are introduced with every family release. New lifecycle stages that overlap with custom values may have been released. Out of box values are preferred as they are used across foundation tables within the entirety of the ServiceNow Platform.

Play 3 - Fix Play

What this Play is about

This play tells you how to correct custom State and Substate choice values where appropriate.

Required tasks

Navigate to Choice Lists as part of System Definition Filter the Choice Lists to use the following query to correct the Asset State attribute: Search Choice List for entries that match the custom choices identified in the previous step to be deleted Make the appropriate corrections based on your analysis. Repeat steps 3 and 4 using the following query definitions for Asset Substate and CI Status:

Data Governance

What this Play is about

This play lists the best practices and processes for managing custom choices within configuration item status

Required tasks

Establish policy and system oversight that discourages customizations to State, Substate, and Status attributes while enabling Data Stewards to ensure data integrity for core data. Leverage quarterly ITAM roadmap review sessions to understand what new features are in development. Communicate with your sales team for scheduling and access. Periodically run the script given in play 1 and check if any new state value is getting added

References

Managing custom Status values for Configuration Items

Do you have custom status values(Operational Status/Install Status) in CMDB? Below playbook can help to manage this,

Percentage of Custom Status Values for CI Lifecycle Stages

Congratulations You have completed this Product Success Playbook.