Tagged “CMDB”

You want to set the Status of a CI in the ServiceNow CMDB, but you find a handful of different fields with Status in the name. Operational Status, Install Status, Hardware Status, Life Cycle Stage... It's not always clear which one you should be using just by looking at them. Here's which one you should use, and what all the other Status fields mean.

So you want to mark a Server in the ServiceNow CMDB as a DEV or a TEST server. At first glance, there's 3 different fields you could use: Environment, Used For, and Classification. Here's a guide on which one to use and why.

So you've got a CI in ServiceNow, but you have no idea what services it supports. If you reboot that server, who's going to angrily knock on your door? There's a few ways in ServiceNow to find out, let's have a look at them.

I keep looking at the "Subscribe" button on the CI form thinking "what do you do anyway?". There's not a lot of documentation around what it does, so I reverse engineered it and here's what I found.

Let's say you're raising a new Incident and the "Configuration Item" field is mandatory, but the CI you need isn't in the CMDB. You can't proceed without it, so you're stuck. What do you do? I asked a few colleagues what strategies they recommend, here's what they said.

You are having fun in the CI Class Manager and you spot a checkbox that says "Principal CI". What does it do? Could it be the answer to overly crowded auto-complete results when trying to set the Configuration Item on tasks?

Don't re-invent the wheel with every CMDB transform map. ServiceNow already saves you time and effort by giving you this utility to harness the magic of the CMDB in your transform maps so you don't have to develop it yourself.