All,

Well as promised here is our latest and greatest framework for a CI Lifecycle that we hope many can find value with it.

For those that have been around a bit, you might remember how @aleck.lin, @Ryan Zulli, and myself had a discovery 301 lab that we did for a couple of years that helped address the insertion, management, and retirement of Configuration items

Well, that lab has gotten a bit dusty in its old age and we thought it a good time to give it a good once over and hopefully improve it to make it more relevant in today's CMDBs.

So I and my very good friend and Co-Worker @emir (Emir Eminovic, ITOM Ranger extraordinaire) set to task to make it even better than before, at least we hope.

Attached is a zip file that contains three parts.

• A readme file that tells you how I switched everything off in the update set so you have to go through and enable the pieces as your guide through the word doc. We don't want anyone just applying a fully active update set, we want you to understand what all the pieces are doing
• Speaking of, a Word doc that will help guide you through the process from CI insertion all the way down to retirement. Dealing with applications, relationships, and supporting CI's such as network interface cards, memory modules, TCP connections, and more...
• An update set with all the major scripting and properties needed. Again, remember I set these to inactive so you can review what's happening and enable them on your own.

Note that the 'scheduled' jobs that are referenced couldn't be tracked in our update set so you'll have to copy/paste those scripts into the jobs you create. My favourite method of scripting.. lol

What you will find are methods to

• ON insert of a new record set it to a pending state so that the record can be reviewed and approved to be part of production processes
• Once approved to make mandatory the support group so that there is always someone known to be responsible for it and lock it in.
• Scheduled jobs to check your Hardware (cmdb_ci_hardware) and Application (cmdb_ci_appl) records and if they haven't been 'discovered' in 'x' amount of time set their states accordingly so they can be followed up on.
• A full retirement process that gives you options to remove related records, including applications or keep them in a "retired" state if you have such auditing or regulatory requirements to do so.

Do know, this is not the be-all end-all of a proper lifecycle process, this is only a framework to help get you started and more importantly get the conversation started within your organization.

If you do take on this journey remember to also include the right folks as you lock yourself in a (virtually nowadays) conference room with walls covered with whiteboards to try and outline every twist and turn your processes might take. You should think of including at a minimum

• CMDB Owner/team (obviously)
• Discovery/Integration/platform Administrators
• Infrastructure teams (server/network/cloud)
• ITSM Process owners
• Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) owners

Everyone here is going to have a critical voice in how you manage these CI from birth to death and is going to help tune this framework and extensions to help make it your own.

Also know we have some great OOB functionality around CI Lifecycle as well. And I hope this can help compliment it, so do look to those features as you design your program.

I do want to thank the many friends out there in our customer base that took the time to give us their thoughts and feedback on how this latest version could help them. And of course a huge hi-five to my friend Emir who did a lot of the heavy lifting to make this a reality.

Enjoy!