View CMDB Health Dashboard

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 5 minutes to read
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    Summary of View CMDB Health Dashboard

    The CMDB Health Dashboard provides ServiceNow customers with a centralized interface to monitor the health of their Configuration Management Database (CMDB). It displays detailed health reports and supports remediation actions to improve data quality. The dashboard automatically collects and calculates health metrics on a recurring schedule once CMDB Health is configured and relevant jobs are enabled.

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    Access and Role Requirements

    • Access via CMDB Workspace: Navigate to Workspaces > CMDB Workspace > Home > Quick links > CMDB Health Dashboard.
    • Access via Navigation Filter: Go to All > Configuration > CMDB Health Dashboard and select a dashboard view (Class, Service, or Health Group).
    • Required roles: asset, itil, or cmdbuser roles are needed to use the dashboard.

    Dashboard Views

    • Class View: Default view showing health reports for CIs and classes within the CMDB hierarchy, filterable by selected class and its descendants.
    • Service View: Displays health reports for services and related CIs; requires Event Management and Service Mapping Core plugins. Only certain service classes and tables are included, and the view respects configurable property limits.
    • Health Group View: Shows health reports for CMDB health groups, filterable by selected groups.

    Key Features

    • KPI Tiles: The dashboard features Completeness, Correctness, and Compliance KPI tiles represented as donut charts showing compliant (green) vs. non-compliant (red) CIs. Users can drill down into specific metrics and classes to analyze failures by discovery source and owner.
    • Calculation Details: Users can view detailed KPI metric calculations, status, and drill down into specific CI health details. A failure threshold icon indicates when tests halt for a metric cycle.
    • Overall Score: Aggregates the three KPIs into a single health score displayed above the KPI tiles, calculated by default as a simple average or by weighted legacy methods if enabled.
    • Legacy Calculation Methods: Optionally toggle legacy calculation methods (requires sncmdbadmin role) to use weighted scores for more granular control over metric and KPI impact on health scores.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Quickly identify and prioritize CMDB health issues across classes, services, or health groups.
    • Understand detailed health metric compliance and root causes for non-compliance.
    • Track health trends over time with percentage change indicators.
    • Enable data-driven remediation actions to continuously improve CMDB quality and reliability.

    Additional Information

    For setup, configuration details, and advanced customization such as aggregation weights, customers should refer to CMDB Health setup documentation and related concepts like remediation rules and health tracking.

    The CMDB Health Dashboard serves as a central location to view detailed health reports for your CMDB at a glance. Also, it provides functions to remediate issues that CMDB Health detected, to improve CMDB health.

    Once you configure CMDB Health and the CMDB Health Dashboard Jobs are enabled, the CMDB Health Dashboard shows meaningful data that is automatically collected and calculated on a recurring schedule. For more information, see Set up and configure CMDB Health.

    Figure 1. CMDB Health Dashboard
    Default view in CMDB Health Dashboard

    Access

    Use either of the following ways to access the CMDB Health Dashboard:
    Within CMDB Workspace
    1. Navigate to Workspaces > CMDB Workspace.
    2. Select Home in the CMDB Workspace menu bar and then, in the Quick links section, select the CMDB Health Dashboard link.
    Navigation filter
    Navigate to All > Configuration > CMDB Health Dashboard and then select one of the following dashboard views:
    • Class View: Default view for the CMDB Health Dashboard, showing health reports for CIs and classes in the CMDB hierarchy.
    • Service View: Health reports for services with details for CIs per service.
    • Health Group View: Health reports for CMDB groups of type Health with details for CIs per group.

    Role requirement: Using the CMDB Health Dashboard requires the asset, itil, or cmdb_user role.

    Legacy calculation methods

    By default, all metrics and KPIs are set with a specific percentage weight in score calculations. However, you can use legacy calculation methods which were used up until the Washington DC release by toggling the Use legacy calculation methods switch (requires the sn_cmdb_admin role) on the CMDB Health Dashboard. In those methods, calculating aggregation scores is based on weights settings for metrics within their KPI, and KPIs within the overall score. Use the legacy calculation methods when it is important to reflect on specific weights of metrics and KPIs in the assessment of CMDB health in your organization.

    For more information about customizing calculation weights for metrics, KPIs, and the overall score, see Configure aggregation weights for CMDB Health score calculations.

    KPI tiles

    The Completeness, Correctness, and Compliance KPI tiles on the dashboard, show the aggregated health for CIs of the specified class (and its descendants), health group, or service. The red portion in the donut report shows the count and percentage of CIs that failed the KPI tests, and the green portion shows the count and percentage of compliant CIs.

    The Completeness, Correctness, and Compliance KPI tiles on the dashboard, show the aggregated health for CIs of the specified class (and its descendants), health group, or service. The KPI's aggregated percentage is represented on the donut as follows:
    • Green: Represents the CIs that are compliant on all of the KPI's metrics
    • Red: Represents the CIs that fail one or more metric
    The distribution of metric compliance can vary greatly across CIs. For example, a single CI failing all metrics or 3 unique CIs each failing a different metric will result in a different KPI final score of aggregation.
    You can show additional details and further drill down the CMDB Health Dashboard:
    • Point to the green and red portions in the donut reports, to show details.
    • Select the View calculation details icon ("i") in a KPI tile to show the calculation details of failure and success for each of the KPI metrics. Calculation details also show the status of the calculation, such as complete.

    • Select a KPI tile and then select a tab for a metric that you want to see more details for. For each metric, the dashboard shows up to ten classes (each class in its own tile) with the highest number of non-compliant CIs for the metric. Each tile for a class shows the total number of non-compliant CIs and also pie reports of those non-compliant CIs by discovery source and by owner.

      For example:
      1. Select the Correctness tile.
      2. Select the Orphan CIs tab.
      3. Assuming that the largest number of CIs that aren't compliant with the orphan metric are Windows Servers, the first tile shows details for those CIs. The tile shows the total number of Windows Server CIs that are orphans. This tile also shows pie reports of those CIs, one by discovery source and another by owner.
      4. Select a CI in the list view to open its CI form.
      5. Scroll in the CI Health tile to the CMDB Health widgets with details about the CI's health.

    The '<x>% since <date>' shows the increase or decrease (in %) in the KPI health since <date> (<date> being the previous time that change was noted). A Warning that max failure is reached. icon indicates that the maximum failure threshold for the metric has been reached. The tests for the metric are halted for this cycle, and all associated aggregated summaries show 0%.

    Overall score

    The overall score appears on the dashboard above the KPI tiles and represents the aggregated health score for the CMDB. The overall score is calculated as an aggregation of the three KPIs (correctness, completeness and compliance). By default, the overall score is a simple average of the KPI scores. However, if using the legacy calculation methods is in effect, then the overall score is based on any weight settings of any of the KPIs.

    Class view in the CMDB Health Dashboard

    The class view shows health reports for CIs and classes in the CMDB hierarchy. Select any class in the CMDB hierarchy to filter all tiles on the dashboard to show health data only for CIs in the selected class and its child classes.

    Select the Class drop-down to switch to the Health Group or the Service view.

    Health Group view in the CMDB Health Dashboard

    Select the Health Group view to show health reports for CIs of a CMDB health group. Select any health group to filter all tiles on the dashboard to show health data only for CIs in the selected health group.

    Select the Health Group drop-down to switch to the Class or the Service view.

    Service view in the CMDB Health Dashboard

    Select the Service view to show health reports for CIs of a service class, such as Business Service, including the service CI itself. Select any service to filter all tiles on the dashboard to show health data only for CIs in the selected service.
    Note:
    The Event Management and Service Mapping Core plugin must be activated to enable meaningful data in the service view.

    Select the Service drop-down to switch to the Health Group or the Class view.

    Settings affecting the service view:
    • The service view uses the settings for the Business Service, Manual Service, and Technical Service classes.
    • The service view doesn’t include all services from the Service [cmdb_ci_service] table. Only services from the cmdb_ci_service_auto table and its descendants (cmdb_ci_service_discovered, cmdb_ci_service_manual, cmdb_ci_query_based_service), are included.
    • Property settings, such as glide.cmdb.services_query_limit, glide.cmdb.services_hierarchy_limit, and glide.cmdb.service_associated_ci_query_limit. For information about how you can use these properties to control the number of items that appear in the service view, see Components installed with CMDB Health.