ServiceNow CMDB – The Single Source of Truth for IT Infrastructure
A CMDB is a crucial information source for IT organizations to provide reliable data to help with service management processes. It also acts as a single source of truth for IT infrastructure, allowing business decision-makers to make accurate IT-based decisions.
With ServiceNow CMDB, it is possible to map and query CI relationships across tables with a clear, graphical view. This helps IT teams understand the relationship between different CIs and the impact of their configuration changes.
What is CMDB?
The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a central repository of information that helps IT teams maintain service uptime. It also provides IT teams with the information they need to make IT decisions based on a single source of truth.
The CMDB takes siloed data from across an entire organization and puts it all in one place, empowering IT and improving business efficiency. It is also key in incident and problem management, root cause analysis, and legal compliance.
A CMDB needs careful maintenance to stay relevant, but the investment can be well worth it when implemented properly. Its centralized location, process automation and asset management help IT teams remain up and running in any emergency.
A healthy CMDB is able to capture all critical configuration items and relationships, without missing any data points. It also ensures data quality and correctness in real-time.
CMDB Relationships
CMDBs are a great way to track the configurations of all your IT assets. The system gathers data from many sources and stores it in a database that is accessible to everyone.
The CMDB is essential to IT decision making, helping users identify dependencies between processes, people, applications and IT infrastructure. This provides insights that can lead to better IT planning, faster resolution of incidents, fewer errors, and more.
CMDBs provide insight into a wide range of IT systems and their relationships, including software, hardware, networks and storage. They can also help businesses identify how changes impact the health of these systems, which is important for operations, accounting, and reporting.
CMDB Health
If you’re like most organizations, a healthy CMDB is critical to IT operations. It can save as much as 40% in IT costs and prevent unplanned outages.
It’s also vital for the deployment of other ServiceNow capabilities including ITOM, SecOps, and GRC. Without a well-configured CMDB, IT teams aren’t able to use the platform to its full potential.
Using the health dashboard, you can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) that help steer your CMDB toward success. These KPIs include CI Correctness, CI Compliance, and CI Completeness.
The CMDB health dashboard provides a single, unified view of data quality across all CMDBs. This view enables you to proactively manage your CMDB/CIs and identify issues, improve the accuracy of your CMDB, and act on them before they become more serious risks to your operational environment.
CMDB Analytics
CMDB analytics help IT teams reduce resolution times for incidents and problems, quickly detect the root cause of issues, and identify the right solutions to solve them. This helps them avoid unplanned downtime, eliminate costly financial losses, and keep IT staff more productive.
Keeping track of configuration items (CIs) can be a daunting task. CI data can be lost or corrupted days or weeks before it is noticed, and business decisions and changes to IT environments may add to the mess.
With a CMDB, IT teams can view how CIs contribute to business services and how they relate to other IT resources. This provides them with a clear understanding of the entire IT estate, which helps them plan upgrades and make better informed decisions about service levels and IT infrastructure costs.
Ideally, a CMDB contains clean, high-quality, and accurate data. This can be accomplished by using auto-discovery tools that scan for data and deduplicate, normalize and categorize it.
