Monitoring and maintaining the health of the CMDB is essential to the effective and continuous use of the product. Health indicators such as duplicate CIs required CI fields and audits contribute to the calculation of health scorecards at the CI, class, and CMDB levels.

A challenge to consolidating and maintaining the CMDB is capturing unknown CIs, inconsistent data quality and ill-defined relationships.

ServiceNow provides a great way to manage critical business services. But maintaining business service relationships with the underlying infrastructure is a continuous effort. Our customers often use Discovery, Service Mapping, and Event Management to keep the CMDB current and healthy with critical service information.

Screenshot: CMDB Dashboard to manage the health of your CMDB from one place

Screenshot 2: Complete visibility and control of critical business services in the CMDB via the Event Management dashboard

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Learn more about CMDB Health here!

You can share your Change Schedules with other groups, users, or roles to access your schedule.

There is also an option to share it with everyone.

Add recipients and, optionally, send an email invitation to your schedule.

Schedules to be shared to other users by user name, group, or role. The share pane also provides a check box to share a change schedule with everybody. If change schedules are not shared with anyone, then only the owner, owner group, and administrator can see them. If a change schedule is shared with other users, an option is available to send an email notification to inform them of their access.

Screenshot: Sharing a change schedules with other audience

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You can record the Workaround and Cause notes under the 'Analysis Information' tab in the Problem record.

The workaround is a temporary way to restore service failures and lessen the impact of a Problem for which an actual resolution is not yet available. You can document and communicate the workaround to let others know that you are aware of the issue.

You should complete the problem Workaround field as soon as possible during the root cause analysis.

Screenshot: Example of a problem with Workaround and Cause notes under the 'Analysis Information' tab

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You can validate that Configuration Management Database (CMDB) still works after you make any configuration change, such as applying an upgrade or developing an application. You can copy and customise these quick start tests to pass when using your instance-specific data.

The CMDB - ATF Tests plugin (com.snc.cmdb.atf) should be activated when you use CMDB quick start tests.

In other words, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) quick start tests require activating the Configuration Management (CMDB) plugin (com.snc.cmdb) and the CMDB - ATF Tests plugin (com.snc.cmdb.atf).

Screenshot: ‘CMDB - ATF Tests’ plugin

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Change Model Success is a change success probability method that indicates how successful each Change Model is, and it includes a Performance Analytics (PA) dashboard for drilling down into the various models for breakdowns.

The Change Model Success dashboard displays trends in the resolution efficiency for the change model over time based on the same parameters used to calculate the overall score. You should clear the selected model to view the trends of all the change models.

Screenshot 1: Change Model Success dashboard

Screenshot 2: Selecting multiple elements from the Change Model drop-down on the Change Model Success dashboard

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Service Catalog enables an administrator to configure the service catalog.

Users with the Catalog Administrator role [catalog_admin] can manage the Service Catalog application, including catalogs, categories and items, but not including scripting functions available to administrators [admin].

Table: Different service request roles and their access

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An end-user can leave feedback about an article by giving a 1-5 star, marking the article as helpful or not helpful and leaving a comment.

Here are the UI components and their description:

• Helpful?: Provide feedback on an article by marking it as helpful or not. View a percentage value of how many other users found the article helpful.
• Rate this article: Rate a knowledge article.
• Click here to comment to this article: Add a comment to an article.

Screenshot: Leaving feedback about an article

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You can use the CMDB Data Manager to centrally create, publish, and manage the CI policies that automatically drive CI life cycle operations. CMDB Data Manager is a policy-driven framework for managing CI life cycle operations such as deletion and archival. It follows Common Service Data Model (CSDM) standards.

CMDB Data Manager is a wizard-like tool that provides a comprehensive solution for managing CIs in the following ways:

• It operates in bulk.
• It scales to large CMDBs.
• It helps maintain the CMDB healthy and efficient.
• It copes with rapid changes in a cloud-based world.

Large CMDBs can, over time, accumulate large amounts of stale CIs, which can impact overall performance. Custom mitigating solutions can be difficult to develop and maintain and are also prone to errors. The CMDB Data Manager is the tool where you can create, publish, and manage policies. Create policies to automate and govern CI life cycle operations to help maintain the CMDB in a healthy and efficient operational state.

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Knowledge articles can be created through several methods. For example:

• You can create a knowledge article from within an existing record, such as an incident or problem.
• You can select the 'Knowledge' check box to generate a draft knowledge article upon closure that automatically contains text from the related record and a source document.

Knowledge Use [kb_use] tracks articles that have been 'attached' to incidents as well as when articles have been viewed.

Note: Administrators can activate the kb_use table cleanup job to delete any older records from the Knowledge Use [kb_use] table and improve the table performance.

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When the configuration items listed in the Affected CIs related list have an asset associated, the Asset action field is populated.

You can choose an Asset action for the CI from the Affected CI related list.

This Asset action field provides three possible actions to select, which trigger an event.

1. Deploy: When this action is selected, the sn_hamp.asset.deploy event is triggered.
2. Update/Repair: No event is triggered for this action.
3. Retire: When this action is selected, the sn_hamp.asset.retire event is triggered.
4. 
   

Diagram: Overview of Asset-CI mapping and synchronisation

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