servicenow cmdb best practices

ServiceNow CMDB: Best Practices

The most significant ServiceNow CMDB best practice is having a system with data you can trust. ServiceNow will tell you that, so will your stakeholders and IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals. 

Achieving high-quality Configuration Management Database (CMDB) data isn’t easy, and many companies will end up re-implementing their CMDB multiple times to try and get it right. 

Experience has shown that most CMDB implementation failures are caused by poor data quality, not poor system configuration. If you want a high-performing CMDB, the best practices suggest that you should focus on the data gathered to populate the CMDB and then automate your IT Discovery to ensure the CMBD is kept up to date. 

A CMDB tool can maintain all other tools

How are you planning on improving the data you manage today? Throwing more people and more money at the problem isn’t the solution. Your CMDB is a database, a place to store information. Improving data quality and overall CMDB value is all about inputs and the outputs. 

Are you still doing manual updates to your CMDB data 2-3 years after its implementation? If so, your ITSM team and your management are likely getting frustrated. Ask yourself these questions:

How much money are you spending collecting and maintaining your configuration data? 

Are you getting the quality and accuracy you need for analytics and decision-making? 

Adopting an automated discovery process allows you to capture robust details about components in your IT environment and populate your CMDB with data that you can trust.

Why can you trust it? Because you know exactly where the data came from, when it was collected, and how it got into your CMDB.

What is CMDB in ServiceNow?

CMDB in ServiceNow provides crucial information about your digital services and the infrastructure that supports them. ServiceNow CMDB uses data from both ServiceNow and third-party tools to provide a complete view of your IT environment in one place. 

With ServiceNow CMDB, you can:

  • Know what’s happening in real-time
  • Predict problems before they happen
  • Easily identify issues with servers or applications
  • Keep track of changes and access historical data
  • Manage change and improve service delivery

What are ServiceNow CMDB best practices?

ServiceNow CMDB best practices are imperative to successfully implementing, designing, and sustaining configuration management.

A few ServiceNow CMDB best practices include:

Defining your goals

Establish clear, measurable goals for your CMDB initiative. This way, you can measure the progress of your initiative against those goals and adjust accordingly. 

Forming a configuration management team

It’s important to have a dedicated team working on your configuration management project. This will allow you to focus on a specific area of responsibility, so that you can achieve results quickly and efficiently. 

Establishing a governance structure

To maintain control over the CMDB process and ensure that it continues moving forward at an optimal pace, it’s important to have a governance structure in place. This ensures that all decisions are documented, reviewed, and approved before being implemented.

Understanding configuration item design

A configuration item is a piece of hardware, software, or any other entity that can be managed within a service management system. CIs are classified to manage them properly and ensure that there are no duplicates. When you start this process, start small and grow gradually. Also make sure that there are no duplicate CIs.

Integrating with key business processes

Start by integrating with key business processes such as asset management, incident management, and so on. Define clear relationships with the various governance boards and align it to the business processes from the start. Document your workflows so that everyone knows how they should be working with each other and their respective roles in the CMDB process.

Avoid over-reliance on a single tool

ServiceNow CMDB should be used in conjunction with other tools that perform similar functions, such as Virima ITSM, Virima ITAM, or Virima IT Discovery and Service Mapping. This will ensure that your organization has a comprehensive view of its IT assets and services.

Get More out of Your ServiceNow Investment with Virima integrations

It is great that you implemented ServiceNow, one of the best commercial ITSM platforms on the market. But Virima can make it better with its superior IT Discovery and Service Mapping capabilities. 

ServiceNow CMDB best practices indicate that your focus should be on data quality and Virima helps to drive better results from your ServiceNow investment so you can accelerate time to value, lower your operational costs, improve ITSM team’s productivity, and enable actual data-driven decision-making.

Virima Discovery is an advanced application IT discovery tool

Virima Discovery offers much more than ServiceNow’s discovery tool. Virima’s offering includes features that all organizations can use to fuel their information demands. Virima IT discovery gives you:

  • Discovery of more devices
  • The ability to collect more information about those devices.
  • Better integration with ServiceNow ITSM and CMDB than the ServiceNow discovery tool. Implementing and operating ServiceNow is a costly endeavor for your company, and maximizing the value from that investment is critical.
  • Enhancing your CMDB data quality by automating discovery is the best way to give your ServiceNow implementation a boost in value.

Service Mapping is the key to better decisions

Once you have data in your CMDB, you need tools for mapping and visualizing service dependencies to make your data informative and actionable. Data at rest in a database is interesting, but the real value comes from putting that data to use. 

ServiceNow offers a service mapping capability, but Virima offers much better visualization tools to expose your CMDB data to ITSM users. 

Change managers need to understand if a change request will impact systems. Incident managers need to see what services are affected by an outage. Problem managers need to trace the root cause back to individual configuration items. 

ViVID  Service Mapping by Virima is designed to give your staff the information they need to solve their most important and time-sensitive business problems.

Find out more about Virima today!

Virima is here to help with ServiceNow CMDB implementation best practices. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!

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