Navigating the complex world of ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB) can feel overwhelming. You might find yourself grappling with understanding the foundational aspects of the CMDB, or maybe you’re seeking effective ways to utilize and integrate it seamlessly into your IT processes.
You want to extract the maximum value from your ServiceNow CMDB but need help figuring out how to start. You’ve got plenty of questions and are likely wondering:
- Should I aim for nearly perfect accuracy with my CMDB?
- Can AIOps support incomplete or outdated CMDBs?
- Does my company have the expertise to work with the ServiceNow partner ecosystem, or should I find a partner for implementation?
If these challenges resonate with you, you’re in the right place. This blog will walk you through the essential facets of ServiceNow CMDB, provide actionable insights on its practical application, and guide you on harnessing external tools and strategies to refine your CMDB experience.
Read on to learn everything you need to know about the ServiceNow CMDB, including:
- What is the ServiceNow CMDB?
- Benefits of using a CMDB with ServiceNow
- Challenges of the ServiceNow CMDB
- Top ServiceNow CMDB use cases
- No CMDB? It’s no problem with BigPanda
- Modernize your CMDB with AIOps
What is the ServiceNow CMDB?
The ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is critical for running processes like incident management, problem management, or change management. Using a CMDB like ServiceNow’s is an ITIL best practice and enables IT teams to manage the relationships between configuration items (CI), maintain asset data, and for IT asset management.
ITSM platforms like ServiceNow require a CMDB to keep a comprehensive record of all IT assets and their relationships. Most users use ServiceNow’s native capability as a trusted single source of truth, which helps ensure data integrity and health; however, other CMDBs can also be integrated with ServiceNow.
Benefits of using a CMDB with ServiceNow
A CMDB takes all the siloed data across the enterprise required to run IT, and it brings it all together in a single place, giving visibility into all of an enterprise’s IT resources. Among other uses, it prevents data from being scattered across multiple different locations, improves incident management, and supports IT cost management.
This enables IT teams to help eliminate outages, significantly reduce mean time to resolve, remain in compliance, understand important service contexts for decision-making, provide information for risk assessment and reporting, and track software license and cloud costs.
Gain visibility and plan: CMDB helps technology managers gain visibility and plan at both a detailed level with asset management and at a high level with enterprise architecture. CMDB assists tech managers in detailed asset management planning and broader enterprise architectural strategies. Manage digital lifecycles by breaking down silos with a single action system across all tables, views, and apps.
Improve IT operations: CMDB enhances essential ITSM functions, such as managing incidents, changes, and problems. With CMDB, change management’s risk evaluation improves, predicting which systems and users may be most affected. It also facilitates compliance by tracking audit histories and control measures.
Achieve data-driven outcomes: By providing a comprehensive view of the IT infrastructure, CMDBs allow teams to analyze data patterns, optimize resources, and predict potential issues, leading to data-driven outcomes and enhanced operational efficiency.
IT cost management: In IT financial management, having specific codes for applications and services is crucial. It assists in distributing bills correctly and overseeing other financial aspects.
Challenges of the ServiceNow CMDB
The ServiceNow CMDB can be complex to set up and maintain. It requires accurate data entry and ongoing updates to ensure configuration items are current and reflective of the actual IT environment. However, a CMDB can quickly become outdated or filled with duplicates without proper governance and processes, diminishing its value for IT operations and decision-making.
- Data quality problems: One main reason CMDBs don’t provide the expected business benefits is data quality problems. And as the amount of configuration data increases and changes happen more rapidly, this issue only intensifies.
- Outdated information: Relying on outdated information from a CMDB can lead to avoidable disruptions and slow the recovery of vital services.
- Unclear relationships and system dependencies: CMDBs don’t clearly show the dependencies between different servers or applications. This means you can’t see which components rely on others to function properly. So, if one element experiences an issue, you may not know exactly how it impacts other parts of your system.
- Challenging implementation: ServiceNow implementation can be quite challenging for companies without the expertise or resources. Without knowledge of the ServiceNow partner ecosystem, implementation is tough and slow-going.
Top ServiceNow CMDB use cases
An effective ServiceNow CMDB can expedite incident resolution by providing quick access to all relevant information. Here are the most common use cases for incident, change, problem, and asset lifecycle management. While these are the top use cases, it’s worth noting that the utility of a CMDB extends to areas like compliance, security, and financial management.
- Incident management: CMDBs are very helpful in managing and resolving IT incidents. They provide detailed insights about the infrastructure, allowing IT teams to identify affected assets during an outage or service disruption quickly. This accelerates the resolution process as teams can instantly pinpoint where the issue resides.
- Change management: When making changes to IT systems, CMDBs help assess the change’s potential impact and risk. By understanding the interdependencies between Configuration Items (CIs), teams can predict which systems might be affected by a change, ensuring smoother rollouts and minimizing unexpected disruptions.
- Problem management and resolution: CMDBs assist in root cause analysis for recurring incidents or complex issues. By examining the historical data and relationships of CIs, IT teams can better understand the underlying cause of a problem and work on a long-term fix.
- Asset lifecycle management: CMDBs help organizations track and manage the entire lifecycle of their IT assets, from procurement to retirement. This ensures that assets are optimally utilized, maintained, and eventually decommissioned or replaced at the right time, leading to cost savings and operational efficiency.
How BigPanda modernizes the ServiceNow CMDB for deeper IT understanding
BigPanda can ingest ServiceNow CMDB data and use it to enrich alerts so operators have all the data they need to triage and remediate incidents. Furthermore, BigPanda provides other capabilities and enhancements to ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and ITOM capabilities. Here’s how:
Service mapping for dynamic infrastructures.
- Fullstack, real-time topology map per incident: Leverage ServiceNow CMDB data (even if incomplete) and outside data sources (APM, cloud, etc.) to visualize and better understand the scope of impact no matter how dynamic the environment.
- Existing service maps aid BigPanda in correlating and prioritizing incidents per business service.
Event Enrichment Engine offers cross-domain enrichment.
- CMDB Override Existing Option: The updated integration adds ServiceNow support for this enrichment flag option, enabling better enrichment of ServiceNow incidents. The flag allows overriding the existing value of a tag with a user-defined value set in BigPanda enrichment maps.
- CMDB Aggregation map: The CMDB aggregation map allows you to populate BigPanda alerts with information from multiple ServiceNow records, such as in relationship tables, in a single enrichment. This provides enrichment flexibility by supporting one-to-many relationships between query keys and results in the CMDB integration map.
Ticket reduction and automation for high-volume monitoring data.
- Reduce alerts by up to 99%: Correlate thousands of alerts into high-level incidents with best-in-class Machine Learning.
- Reduce ticket volume by up to 99%: Auto-create ServiceNow tickets.
- Reduce manual effort: Bi-directional sync keeps ServiceNow tickets up to date as BigPanda incident evolves.
Automated root cause analysis for continuously delivered applications.
- Quickly identify root cause: BigPanda AI correlates changes from ServiceNow (and other tools) that may have caused the incident, allowing your teams to easily and quickly identify and roll back these changes to resolve outages.
- By collecting change data from sources like CI/CD pipelines, BigPanda uses AI/ML to suggest potential root causes, aiding teams in addressing outages swiftly.
Integrating AIOps with your CMDB software grants a profound understanding of your IT landscape. Rather than simply identifying the components in your repository, AIOps enables a more advanced, real-time insight. This approach emerges as a CMDB best practice, showing the interrelations of various elements in complex, hybrid IT settings.
BigPanda and ServiceNow: Better together
Implementing ServiceNow can pose challenges for companies without sufficient resources, and the complexities of its partner ecosystem add to the task. However, BigPanda bridges this gap, enhancing the benefits of ServiceNow. With BigPanda, adopting ServiceNow is simplified since the platform is inherently equipped to handle incidents, changes, and CMDB.
For example, Trace3 customers previously grappled with managing a high volume of ServiceNow tickets. Yet, after integrating with BigPanda, alert fatigue dropped by over 90% through deduplication and correlation, creating actionable and meaningful incidents with context and relevant data.
The ever-evolving nature of IT environments means ServiceNow’s CMDB isn’t static. BigPanda enhances its value by merging data from ServiceNow’s CMDB with other sources, offering a real-time view of business services. As BigPanda customer Udo Strick from Waste Management commented, “With [BigPanda], we enrich our events using CMDB data, adding extra context to the tickets we generate.”
BigPanda ingests change data from various platforms, including ServiceNow, and correlates it with alert data. This offers a clear understanding of the cause and effect of changes, helping to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and ensuring that impacts of changes are detected before they escalate to significant incidents.
No CMDB? It’s no problem with BigPanda
Although CMDB data can help reveal the status of your infrastructure, if your company doesn’t have a CMDB, BigPanda can still provide considerable value.
While it’s true that many other tools require a mature and robust CMDB to be effective, BigPanda is different in that the correlation patterns created by our explainable and pragmatic AI can effectively identify ways to correlate alerts and reduce noise even without a CMDB. We have seen up to 70% compression rates without even using a CMDB.
Modernize your CMDB with AIOps
AIOps can offer a more extensive analytical framework and employ AI-driven data enhancement to greatly enhance the operational performance and efficiency of your CMDB. See for yourself how BigPanda can efficiently analyze and correlate data, providing you with a comprehensive view of your organizational infrastructure for more intelligent, more effective IT systems management. With AIOps at your side, achieving and maintaining an optimal CMDB standard goes from a distant goal to a tangible reality.
