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Relating CMDB configuration items to work items...

Jason_MeyerJason_Meyer Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

What are the options for automatically relating CMDB configuration items to work items?


For example, if a unique Computer Name or Business Service Name is in the Description of an IR, can/will the CMDB configuration item be automatically related?


Kind of like the @mention capability...

Answers

  • Simon_ZeinhoferSimon_Zeinhofer Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭

    You could add an SCO Runbook or a powershell activity to the incident template, which runs after creation and checks if there is something inside the description/title, which could be tide to a config item.

    But from mail I think this is pretty difficult as you have no pre-filtering what a user might write inside the mail body. Inside a request offering this sounds like it is doable imo. E.g. a text field where the user has to write the hardware asset name or the bussiness service name (or unique ID) inside this field, the activity searches for the corresponding object in the cmcb and relates it.

  • Adam_DzyackyAdam_Dzyacky Product Owner Contributor Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭

    A lot of this depends on the point of entry, but I'll do my best to cover them all:

    • First - to Simon's point, if you create a New Incident in the portal, you could configure the portal to use an Incident template that has a runbook associated to it that evaluates the Description and then makes those relationship updates
    • You could have a runbook/PowerShell job that is periodically monitoring all open Incidents checking to see if anything has changed/should be updated given the Description. You could even go as far to monitor Comments on an Incident. This would then become a "catch all" of sorts that let's say runs every hour, in the event an Incident is created not using the Template above.
    • Another option is a combination of runbooks and Parent Incidents. For example, you could have a Parent Incident that has all of the impacted Config Items on it. As you attach Child Incidents, the runbook automatically updates the Child Incidents to ensure they match everything from the Parent. This is kind of like the above example, but instead of every hour its on an event of relating an Incident to a Parent Incident
    • When it comes to email, you could still go the Template route above or you'd have to turn to the SMLets Exchange Connector because you could do some initial screening as the Work Item is getting created. But this route is 100% PowerShell based
    • Going one step further on the SMLets connector, if you are already relating Config Items to Work Items. It does feature an artificial intelligence component, so that when emails come in, Config Items (amongst other properties) are predicted and set out of the gate.
    • Last but not least, if you are using Operations Manager (SCOM) to create Incidents, it will automatically relate a Config Item to an Incident when its created. This is easily the slickest and most consistent way to capture this data.


    All of that said - are there times when you would not want this type of relationship update to occur?

  • Jason_MeyerJason_Meyer Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
    edited May 2023

    Appreciate the responses.

    We currently measure our ITSM performance on volume of IRs, duration of IRs, ratio of IRs per employee. I'd like to add Business Service to that so I can then report to those service owners, how efficiently their services are running.

    We have CMDB information in multiple solutions, locations, etc.

    Trying to determine how/if we can leverage this tool to centralize/standardize any of that data to make it useful 'enterprise' wide for our organization.

    Most of our existing CMDB information is very specific to the team needing it, working it and is not used or understood by the teams creating/working tickets.

    If relating a CMDB item is left up to our 1000 portal analysts to do manually, we feel the accuracy will be low.

    I think where we are currently at is selecting 10 of our business services and creating them in Portal CMDB database and leveraging the methods above to tie work items to those services and see what value we see.

    Does anyone have any real world examples of how they are using "Config Items" or in Portal to provide value? Or how they are using CMDBs to improve their services delivered.

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