Overview of CMDB Health

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 6, 2024
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Overview of CMDB Health

    CMDB Health is a ServiceNow feature that monitors and reports the health of your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) data using key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs assess the quality and integrity of your Configuration Items (CIs) across four main areas: Completeness, Correctness, Compliance, and Relationships. Each KPI includes specific sub-metrics that check for missing fields, data integrity issues such as duplicates or stale records, adherence to audit certificates, and the validity of CI relationships.

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    After evaluating CIs against these health indicators, CMDB Health aggregates results at different levels such as class, health group, service, and relationship, and presents them in dashboards for actionable insights.

    Key Features

    • Configurable Health Tests: Customize how CIs are evaluated for compliance or non-compliance with health standards.
    • CMDB Health Dashboards and Reports: Accessible via CMDB Workspace, these dashboards display aggregated health results by class, service, health group, and relationships. They provide drill-down access to remediation tasks for failing CIs.
    • Relationship Health Dashboard: Focuses specifically on the health and integrity of CI relationships, identifying duplicates, orphans, and stale connections.
    • CI Health Reporting: Enables direct inspection of individual CI health details within CMDB Workspace for targeted analysis and troubleshooting.
    • Setup and Configuration: Includes enabling CMDB Health Dashboard jobs, configuring system properties, KPIs, and test rules to align with your organization’s standards.
    • CI Class Manager: Centralized management of CI classes and health test rules such as orphan detection, audit certificates, and recommended fields.
    • Health Preferences: Central configuration area to activate KPIs/metrics, adjust failure thresholds, and manage remediation task creation.
    • CI Remediation Framework: Supports automated, standardized corrective actions on unhealthy CIs to improve data quality proactively.
    • Domain Separation Awareness: CMDB Health respects domain boundaries when the domain separation plugin is enabled, applying domain-specific settings or inheriting from parent domains as needed.

    What This Enables You to Do

    With CMDB Health, ServiceNow customers can continuously monitor and improve the quality of their CMDB data, ensuring it remains complete, correct, compliant, and well-structured. The dashboards provide visibility into problematic CIs and relationships, while the remediation framework facilitates timely corrective actions. Configurability lets you tailor health criteria to your organizational policies and standards, fostering better decision-making and operational efficiency.

    By implementing CMDB Health, you can expect improved data integrity, more reliable configuration management processes, and enhanced confidence in the CMDB as a source of truth for IT and business services.

    Learn about the benefits, configuration, and usage of the CMDB Health feature.

    The health of the CMDB data is monitored and reported for the following KPIs, each further consisting of sub-metrics:
    Completeness
    CIs are tested for required and recommended fields that are not populated.
    Correctness
    CIs are tested against predefined data integrity rules such as identification rules (to detect duplicate CIs), orphan CI rules, and stale CI rules.
    Compliance
    The CMDB data is audited for adherence to predefined certificates.
    Relationships
    The health of CI relationships is tested for indicators such as orphan and duplicate relationships, and for compliance with suggested relationships, hosting and containment rules.

    After CIs are tested for various health indicators (metrics), the results are aggregated at the class, health group, service, and relationship level, and appear on CMDB Health dashboards. For most metrics, you can configure the health tests themselves to determine how compliance and non-compliance of CIs are evaluated.

    For more details about the KPIs and their associated metrics, see CMDB Health KPIs and metrics.

    Note:
    CMDB Health doesn't support non-CMDB tables.

    CMDB Health dashboards and reports

    You can view CMDB Health dashboards and reports in CMDB Workspace. Those dashboards show CMDB Health aggregated results for compliant and non-compliant CIs for CMDB Health KPIs and their metrics.

    Dashboard/Report Use
    CMDB Health Dashboard
    1. Navigate to Workspaces > CMDB Workspace.
    2. Select Home in the CMDB Workspace menu bar.
    3. In the Quick links section select the CMDB Health Dashboard link.
    or:
    1. Navigate to All > Configuration > CMDB Health Dashboard.
    2. Select one of the views.
    		 Main CMDB Health dashboard with the following views:
    Class View
    • Shows CIs and classes health reports with aggregations for metrics, KPIs, and class branches.
    • Access to remediation tasks that were generated for CIs that failed a health test.
    Service View
    • Shows service health reports.
    • Detailed health for CIs per service with aggregations for metrics and services.
    • Access to remediation tasks that were generated for CIs in a service that failed a health test.
    Health Group View
    • Shows health reports for CMDB groups of type Health.
    • Detailed health for CIs in the group, with aggregations for KPIs, metrics, and health groups.

    In either dashboard view you can select CMDB Health settings to manage the CMDB Health Dashboard jobs and configure other CMDB Health settings. For more information, see Set up and configure CMDB Health.
    Relationship Health dashboard
    1. Navigate to Workspaces > CMDB Workspace.
    2. Select Home in the CMDB Workspace menu bar.
    3. In the Quick links section select the Relationship Health Dashboard link.
    		 Shows various charts for relationships health, such as duplicate, orphan, and stale relationships. For more information, see View relationships health.
    CI health report
    • On a CI form that isn't in CMDB Workspace, select Open in CMDB Workspace.
    • In CMDB Workspace, select a CI in a list view to open the CI's form. For example, on the CMDB Health dashboard, drill down a KPI tile and then select a CI in the tile's list view.
    		 On a CI form, the CI Health tile contains widgets that show CIs health reports. Select the right (>) or left (<) handles in the CI Health tile to scroll through the widgets.

    Setup and configuration

    To start gathering and aggregating health data, you must enable the CMDB Health-related jobs (CMDB Health Dashboard jobs) which are initially disabled. You also need to configure CMDB Health related system properties and health KPIs and metric test rules, to reflect health standards in your organization.

    For details about setting up and configuring CMDB Health, see Set up and configure CMDB Health.

    Location Configuration
    CI Class Manager

    Configuration > CI Class Manager

    Central location to manage CI classes and to configure CMDB health settings. Use the CI Class Manager to Manage rules and definitions that are used for health tests, such as orphan rules, audit certificates, and recommended fields rule.

    For information about configuring KPI and metric tests, see CMDB Health KPIs and metrics.
    CMDB Health Preferences

    Navigate to Configuration > Health Preferences, or perform the following steps:

    1. Navigate to All > Configuration > CMDB Health Dashboard.
    2. Select a view.
    3. On the CMDB Health dashboard, select CMDB Health settings.
    		 Central location for configuring CMDB Health settings:
    • Configure CMDB Health system properties.
    • Enable and manage the CMDB Health Dashboard jobs.
    • Activate or deactivate KPIs and metrics.
    • Set the maximum failure threshold for the KPIs and metrics.
    • Configure creation of tasks for failed CIs.

    CI remediation

    CMDB Health provides a framework for configuring CI remediation. Remediation lets you proactively apply corrective actions to unhealthy CIs in a managed and standardized fashion.

    Domain separation

    CMDB Health is domain aware. If the domain separation plugin has been activated, then the CMDB Health dashboard shows health based on data, rules, and settings from the logged-on user domain. If rules and settings aren't defined for a child domain, then the parent's settings are applied, recursively.

    For more information, see Domain separation in CMDB Health.