Following our Identification and Reconciliation post in this series, I wanted to briefly introduce the Identification Rule, a key part of the IRE system. We'll continue to dig into IRE with this series, check back for more soon.

Now that you've decided to funnel all of your Configuration Items (CIs) into ServiceNow via IRE, we need to sort out what each item is, and how it should be marked as unique. Identifications Rules perform this step with two distinct parts.

Part 1 - Identification Rules (the obvious one)

• You'll find these under CI Identifiers
• Each destination CI class will get one CI Identifier / Identification rule
• Specifies whether this CI class is Independent or Dependent (dependant CIs must be related to another CI to be allowed through IRE into your CMDB)
• Your post to IRE includes the destination class, which indicates the rule to use