Deleting obsolete Windows Computer CI's and HW Assets

Haseeb_Malik

Hi Guys,
We have around 10,000 Windows Computer CI's and equal number of HW Assets that are no longer in AD or SCCM and would like to clean these up and I'm hoping you guys can clear a couple of things up for me...

- Apart from the benefit of having cleaner data, does the total number of HW Assets and Windows CI's in the DB have an affect on performance and loading Views from the console or portal?

- If a deleted windows CI was associated to a work item, would the association and ci still exist in SSRS or Cube reports?

joivan_hedrick

Aye, the number of CIs would indeed have an impact on loading speed for views in both the console and the Portal.

In the console, opening any view will load a maximum of 500 objects. It will then let you load all remaining. Depending on the type projection that the view uses, this may take 10-60 seconds to finish loading the objects in a random order. This means that you won't effectively be able to search until all items are finished loading. 

The Portal default view behavior will simply load all 10,000 objects, taking the full allotted time to show any items in the view. With an expensive type projection and the right number of CIs, you'll be waiting 60 seconds, followed by the page optionally auto-refreshing every 60 seconds, meaning your data will never load. 

Besides views, the speed hit for searching through 10000 objects is moreorless negligible. 

DWDataMart, which feeds SSRS and Cube reporting, will store all relationships for Windows CIs and Hardware Assets. Once a relationship is deleted, it will mark that object as deleted and no longer show it in reporting. To see the previous relationship(s), you would most likely have to create a query to view the most recently deleted relationship object for the CIs in question.

Tony_Collett

Be aware when deleting a large number of config items, this can be a large drain on resources.

We deleted over 30000 objects from our testing environment and it totally killed our environment as it not only deletes the objects, but it also has to go through and delete all the relationships as well. This is no small feat.

We backed out and we eventually got rid of them by deleting 500-1000 every 3 hours.

Ultimately, it would be better to simply mark all the assets as Decommissioned (using Asset Import or Asset Excel) and creating a view that uses a criteria that doesn't show those items.

joivan_hedrick

Aye, the number of CIs would indeed have an impact on loading speed for views in both the console and the Portal.

In the console, opening any view will load a maximum of 500 objects. It will then let you load all remaining. Depending on the type projection that the view uses, this may take 10-60 seconds to finish loading the objects in a random order. This means that you won't effectively be able to search until all items are finished loading. 

The Portal default view behavior will simply load all 10,000 objects, taking the full allotted time to show any items in the view. With an expensive type projection and the right number of CIs, you'll be waiting 60 seconds, followed by the page optionally auto-refreshing every 60 seconds, meaning your data will never load. 

Besides views, the speed hit for searching through 10000 objects is moreorless negligible. 

DWDataMart, which feeds SSRS and Cube reporting, will store all relationships for Windows CIs and Hardware Assets. Once a relationship is deleted, it will mark that object as deleted and no longer show it in reporting. To see the previous relationship(s), you would most likely have to create a query to view the most recently deleted relationship object for the CIs in question.

Tony_Collett

Be aware when deleting a large number of config items, this can be a large drain on resources.

We deleted over 30000 objects from our testing environment and it totally killed our environment as it not only deletes the objects, but it also has to go through and delete all the relationships as well. This is no small feat.

We backed out and we eventually got rid of them by deleting 500-1000 every 3 hours.

Ultimately, it would be better to simply mark all the assets as Decommissioned (using Asset Import or Asset Excel) and creating a view that uses a criteria that doesn't show those items.

Haseeb_Malik

Thanks for the insight Joivan and Tony, clears things up nicely for me.

Geoff_Ross

Just wanted to add this is a common issue but can be avoided with a nice piece of automation. Once you've deleted the 10,000 assets and CIs you will want to keep your system tidy by continually removing assets and CIs as PCs come out of use. You can trigger workflow on the status change from Deployed to Stock / Retired depending on your processes of when to delete the CIs (remember both classes - Windows Computer and Computer (Deployed). You can tidy the AD object away as well in the process as well and send notifications, etc

Conner_Wood

You best be careful deleting Config Items themselves, Microsoft foolishly thought it'd be a good idea to tie the Primary Workflow Server Functionality through the Config Item.  You delete that and all SCSM workflows come to an end and remain unresponsive.

Luckily someone spent a huge amount of effort for a fix but appears his webpage and even account has disappeared.
https://www.concurrency.com/blog/february-2016/recovering-scsm-workflow-server

Luckily I determined it was important to make an offline copy

"The moral of the post is please don’t delete your workflow server from the Windows Server view in Service Manager" ~ Gerald Lott

Nicholas_Velich

Conner_Wood said:

You best be careful deleting Config Items themselves, Microsoft foolishly thought it'd be a good idea to tie the Primary Workflow Server Functionality through the Config Item.  You delete that and all SCSM workflows come to an end and remain unresponsive.

Luckily someone spent a huge amount of effort for a fix but appears his webpage and even account has disappeared.
https://www.concurrency.com/blog/february-2016/recovering-scsm-workflow-server

Luckily I determined it was important to make an offline copy

"The moral of the post is please don’t delete your workflow server from the Windows Server view in Service Manager" ~ Gerald Lott

In other words, when attempting to get a clean slate of CIs, don't go in Configuration Items -> Computers, hit CTRL + A and delete . The Management Server is a special type of CI that does appear in that view, and workflow functionality is tied to it.

Management Server:


Plain-old computer:

Haseeb_Malik

Hey guys, thanks for the additional tips.

Steve_Clarke

Hi Guys, yesterday I deleted all Computer CI's on a system that has been running for a while (but not live in production). The idea was to get a fresh import of all active AD objects and remove any stale objects in the process.

I deleted all ~1400 CI's (apart from the Workflow Server). I then waited about 40 minutes after everything disssapeared from the console before initiating a fresh sync of the AD and connector.

After running the AD and SCCM connectors again we saw all the correct objects from Ad reappear. However I noticed when looking at the history of the 'new' CI's that it still showed a few years of history for the object. It also included a lot of remove actions for associatiations to other objects that would have occured when deleting the object.

Do you think this would indicate that I did not wait long enough after deleting all CI's before doing the re-import? It kind of looks like the import may have re-animated the old CI object before it was completely removed from the database?