Configuration Management

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Configuration Management

    The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) application provides a comprehensive view of your IT infrastructure, enabling effective monitoring and management of your network for stability and performance. It serves as a centralized source for storing detailed information about your organization’s configuration and relationships between various components.

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    Key Features

    • CMDB: Create and manage representations of your infrastructure, including configuration items (CIs) like computers, servers, and services.
    • Common Service Data Model (CSDM): Standardizes data terminology across the ServiceNow platform, ensuring consistent modeling and definitions for CIs and IT services.
    • Application Services: Manage interconnected applications and hosts that provide services, such as internal email systems, by storing their relationships within the CMDB.
    • Data Integration: Use Service Graph and connectors to import third-party data into the CMDB, ensuring compliance with defined structures and maintaining data integrity through processes like Identification and Reconciliation.

    Key Outcomes

    Utilizing the CMDB allows ServiceNow customers to analyze trends, reduce problems, and enhance incident management by understanding the interactions between various CIs. By ensuring consistent data across all databases and integrating third-party information effectively, organizations can improve operational efficiency and decision-making within their IT environments.

    The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) application is a centralized source that gives you full visibility into your IT environment. By storing information about your organization's infrastructure and how it is configured, this system allows you to monitor your network and ensure stability and best performance. Other ServiceNow® applications enhance the effectiveness of the CMDB application or closely overlap to enable needed business goals.

    Overview of CMDB

    Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

    Create models of your infrastructure using Configuration Management. Store your infrastructure data, represented by configuration items (CI)—all the computers, servers, routers, database instances, and services in your network. Analyze trends, reduce problems, and handle incidents by monitoring relationships between CI.

    Common Service Data Model (CSDM)

    Ensure your data is consistent across every database and ready for every ServiceNow product. The CSDM provides standard terms and definitions for your CI, and any IT services you use. Map your data to CMDB tables clearly using this modeling to provide it to the apps that use it, across the entire ServiceNow AI Platform.

    Application services

    Use application services to represent and manage operations of various ServiceNow business units and products. An application service is a set of interconnected applications and hosts which are configured to offer a service to the organization such as an organization's internal email system. The various CIs and the relationships between them comprise an application service and are stored in the CMDB.

    Data integration

    Populate the CMDB by importing and integrating third-party data into the CMDB, in bulk. Use Service Graph connectors to specify process parameters and any needed conversions to be applied to the imported data. Such integrations utilize robust CMDB processes, such as Identification and Reconciliation, to ensure the integrity of the CMDB after third-party data integrations.

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