welcome to service sharp this is a podcast all about service now we'll be talking strategy architecture technology and everything service now this podcast is not affiliated with ServiceNow the opinions expressed are our own we're just people that are very passionate about the platform join us for every episode alright this is Jason Gibson we are back with Service sharp I have of course rainy Justin and burnt with me but I do have an additional guest today Kathy Sullivan Kathy would you introduce yourself a little bit sure Kathy Sullivan I have been working with service now for five years or so and I am a specialist and the topic that we're gonna be discussing tonight with CMDB yes yeah so we are going over CMDB this afternoon and I'm gonna give Randy and Justin and Brent a little bit of time here to say hi Randy I'm Randy Hogg's I am NOT an expert in tmdb but I play one on TV yeah there you go Justin there's a glass pool my developer been working with the system for five six years or so and I won't have a lot to say big CMDB is not something I would say I'm heavily okay and Brent Brent Peters been working with service now for about eight years now a little bit of everything in service now including some seem to be stuff okay all right guys well let's get started the CMDB it stands for the configuration management database so that's got to be confusing to people so let's go right into it what is seam DB other than the configuration management database [Music] does that mean what does that mean what do i what do i do is it for what is it you know what is it good for a CMDB is a really good operational tool for your IT staff really to be able to have information in front of them that defines how their systems are configured so you can map out servers to databases and to firewalls and to switches and load balancers and you can see all of that information in front of you a CMDB is filled with what's called configuration items or CIS and it is it can be used to really determine whenever you have an outage what else is affected by that by using relational data yeah so the relationships is key right you have you know each piece related to the the next piece so you have a server and a switch and the things are related and one of the things that I find it most helpful for is incident and change incident being that you can map an incident or a problem to a specific configuration item whether it's a server going down or something to that effect that you actually can map to that to make the record of that issue right correct and in change management it's really great because you can see where you'll have conflicts during a change window or a maintenance window so that you can order your work and know what needs to come first or what needs to come last so that if you're gonna take down a switch that's gonna affect all these other things then maybe do that like this or not schedule them all at the same time and so it's really great from a change perspective as well to be able to identify your conflicts yeah so complex are really important in kind of to figure out the the change management piece of that is extremely important for the stability of the system long term right so let's downs less problems but it also allows us to make intelligent business decisions when we look at incidents or we look at changes and we only analyze the data so we have 50 incidents of this one server going down in the last three months well I think that's a problem you know in in so it allows us to get kind of a better view or a higher view of all the systems that you have right right because there's a lot of information depending on how you feed your how you populate the data within your CMDB there's a lot of information out there too that can be used from an operational standpoint say that one of your operating systems is going end-of-life I saw this through multiple data centers with Windows 2003 that they had all of this stuff that needed to be switched over and the CMDB was a great way to be able to leverage that information so that you had an accurate assessment of what servers really needed to be transitioned onto a different operating system well that's great yeah I'm working with a company right now that is dealing with end of life for a software and everything's in a spreadsheet and and you know there's been multiple meetings just trying to find out who's in charge of each one of these servers so that we can even get a plan going for for doing immigrants so it's a it's a huge deal to have that information about is a huge time saver and I think that it's really the key to getting the most out of service now you know you can you can have all those other modules individually and you always start with the individual models but if you really want the power of having everything in one platform you kind of have to have it I think well and I think Brent if if you can kind of back me up here there are lots of other ways that you can use that CMDB data in a you know requests or other modules is there an example of where you've used it in the past that has been very helpful yeah if you think of it from a night Elston standpoint I tell says that seem to be should be like your foundation and all the other eye tells processes go off of that so you have your or use that I should say so like problem management's great service catalog I've used it to automate some of the service catalog stuff like you said for like assignment one of the biggest one is application enhancements so somebody puts an application enhancement now this is the application you can go to the configuration management database find the support group and that's the people that assign the ticket to most of the time so it's good for some of that automation but just you know knowing where things are what's connected that kind of stuff is great sure sure in its I know it can get really confusing for people what is a CI but and what is an asset and so kind of to bring up a subject I think we're all understanding this an issue is understanding the difference between an asset and a CI Kathy could you explain that just a little bit yeah sure so in my world where I and in ITIL definitions a CI a configuration item is something that you intend to configure in some way or another it is it could be anything from like a network card to an IP address or even up to a server a desktop a workstation or anything like that whereas an asset is something that has some type of financial value to it you want to track the and there it is I told you animals were going to be here here's you and she's gonna step on my computer so anyway an asset has some financial some type of financial relevance to it so you have a workstation you know how much your workstations cost for various different positions and you track that information in a financial and you can be able to try and track you know when do we need to renew this when is it replaceable and that's how you cut you order this stuff there but those those same assets can also be a configuration item because that's that represents the work that's being done to it so while an asset tracks your financial piece to that asset it being a configuration item is where you track what's being done to that device as well basically what I'm understanding is that that an asset will always be a CI but a CI is not necessarily an asset unless you want to track the monetary value of that that's correct awesome awesome so when using assets what do you find helpful in in in in assets is the the whole thing about life cycle of that asset is that where you find people most use the asset I think that the assets yes from a lifecycle standpoint but I also think whenever it comes to especially looking at different devices sometimes within ServiceNow at least in my experience the assets themselves are better at visualizing what all is on that asset especially from a workstation standpoint so you go you pull up your asset your workstation an asset you can see all the software that is assigned to that workstation so that whenever a an employee needs a new workstation you know what is supposed to go on the new asset as well and sometimes that's unless you have the right related table showing and your CIS you don't always see that and it just kind of depends on how you have it set up but I feel like asset works better for that is being able to get a a view of what actually exists on the on those individual systems right right so one of the things that I think that that I've seen very helpful is when you're bringing in data you can also bring warranty data and things to that effect that then set for warranty expiration you know you know with you can run a report that here are my asset here's when their warranty is going to expire you can set a three-year end of life on them and say okay then these are these are all three years we replace all of these and then rotate those out as the life cycle of it I really love the idea of starting in and finishing and in service now and that goes back to something that I think Brent actually created at some point where they were bringing in assets and Brent can you explain a little bit about how that was working with the bar code correct oh well yeah whenever we had and one of the systems that I worked in we when it came into the warehouse when it somebody ordered it we created a asset for that device when it came into the warehouse they tied the serial number to the asset they tied a barcode to that serial number in that asset tag and then throughout its life every time someone went and visited that device they would scan the barcode they'd bring up the the asset they do their updates on it whatever they needed to to make sure or verify this information also and then they make sure that updates were right if they needed to take it maintenance they change the status and so on then whenever that device was end-of-life they would go through the process of also doing the end of life so it was burst to death on that device and they'd followed it through once it was retired that barcode was then retired with it and you just move on to the next one so it was great being able to do that kind of stuff see that's and that's very cool stuff I really like that I have seen somebody has actually said to me or a couple of times that they don't see a need for the seem to be at all and a curiosity what would what would you say to somebody who came to you and said hey I just don't see a need for it I think we can we can do it on a spreadsheet do you only have one rack of equipment in your data center I think that my question to them legitimately would be have you ever experienced an outage that was preventable right because you made a mistake in a change or somebody was doing something at the same time and how much how much money did your business lose because of that outage I think I would ask how much money it costs you to keep your systems up and running and when they're down how much is the cost right and I mean either way it's unless you have I have had I've worked for small companies I worked for large companies and I always found that even in a small company even that you just don't have enough people you don't have enough body resources to really know all of the little inner workings that are going on and it's not mapped out anywhere so even in small companies I think that a CMDB you would be beneficial because then you know what's connected to what and you could bring in a new person and show them hey this is what our systems look like and they'd be like oh okay you know it wouldn't take a bunch of legacy information and no documentation to bring up a new person they could be hopeful right away right exactly so you know don't put enough value on some of those things you know it's you know a lot of times it's in my opinion very short-sighted from a strategy standpoint to to miss the utility of a CME but you know there are a great number of people that make decisions based on what's expedient versus what's long term good for the company and you know in my and this is me just going off on us so bucks here but long term in the state of IT small business medium business large business that's that thinking is gonna have to stop in order for companies to stay profitable and they're going to start thinking about what foundational little steps can we take for long term benefit rather than just patching today patching today patching today yeah and if you go back and look at it from a security standpoint as more and more things get online as more and more IOT projects come online and other that that stuff without a CMDB you have no clue what your exposure is to a vulnerability that comes out right exactly you know and I and I think it's interesting that we're talking about money a lot here because the amount of money ServiceNow can save you I know it costs but the amount of that it can save you is exponential with what I have found is the more valuable the product really is and the more value you get out of it so if you use HR and I tell and I Tom and all so if you're using the full suite you get a lot more value out of the product because all of these things interconnect ServiceNow is the epitome of you've got to spend money to make money everything is I mean all of the modules well not all I should say because some of them like project and agile some of agile I guess connects but a lot of the ITSM parts of the modules all connect to seem to be and all kind of rely on seem to be and asset yeah absolutely so let's let's do this we're gonna take a quick break listen to our sponsor pay the bills a little bit and in just just a little bit be right back with you and when we come back we're gonna talk about where do I start so we'll be right back this podcast was made with anchor anchor is the easiest way to create and publish your podcast it's free creation tools with it allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer helps you distribute your podcast it's super simple to publish to Spotify Apple podcast Google Play any of the major ones you can make money from your podcast there's no minimum listenership so they make it super easy to monetize it's really everything you need to make a podcast in one place so why don't you go out and download the free anchor app or go to anchor FM and get started [Music] welcome back we with we take a quick break and we are back we're talking about CM TV and I wanted to talk about where do I start so you have CMDB you you you bought it when you bought service now you haven't turned it on where do I start you if you have discovery you turn on discovering you let it put everything that is finds on the network in there yes I've been down that road argued someone they wanted to do it and cleaning up those messes but lived with the discovery integration that they know what that looks like and it's a it's not pretty very difficult I think the most important part to me is is getting your ducks in a row and understanding what you want how you want it and what you want to track what's valuable to you getting those conversations done before a single thing is done inside the tool yeah you really need to identify absolutely identify not just your stakeholders but your sneeze that know what is in your network and knows what hey what are you really gonna want to track things against what kind of what kind of great outages are you know incidents do you get I mean the the workstations and the servers those are your big rocks I mean everybody knows that but what little things do you really want to be able to track anything against and sometimes getting that information is really challenging because they're like well just populate everything I'm like I don't think you understand what that means let me do you racy right your AC chart yeah yep make sure you understand how it works in ITIL and and so I guess Cathy could you kind of explain a little bit for those who don't know what a racy chart is what that what that is sure you people are teams and you have a list of responsibilities and you identify who's accountable for it who supports it who's who provides inputs and who's ultimately responsible for it and I think this C is it consulting right supports or consulting and then there's like informational yeah and and so you have these people and so let's say you identify you have a specific server team that supports Windows those people are responsible for keeping those systems updated for applying patches for any type of outages or problems that may come up so ultimately they're responsible to make sure the hardware is so running but the application that sits on that server is owned by somebody else and somebody else is responsible for that whether that's a developer or an application specialist you those are really important to be able to identify that information and I really think that going back to the root question about what really where you start is you start from I I would think that you start from the ground up so you pick a lot of people start servers because they're the easiest thing to kind of be able to identify a lot of times you can get your servers from either your ad credentials or LDAP and be able to populate that information fairly easily into the system through either discovery or if there is another tool then that you have I've done it with both I'm starting there and then kind of building out from there okay well what's on this server what does it connect to and discovery does all that for you really really well sometimes a little too well because it will literally get everything that's configurable and the nice thing I think for me is that when you start down this road once you have that you have discovery or exit 4 options discovery discovery with support with additional things like SCCM and other tools that are already used in the in this in the organization including including ad things too that you you can populate data based on where it's from you can manually input data or you can or you can just bring data from outside so with that being said kind of Brent and Kathy could you talk just a minute about what you see is the most successful well what I've seen successfully and I don't know I kind of like this approach but it's just because it's easier for for everybody is I just say start out simple like Kathy was saying start with like your Windows servers and bring in some of the info and then start pulling in more and that kind of stuff and doing yours your relationships that way you're not overwhelming everybody that's trying to do it so you just start simple and start pulling things in as you can don't make it real complicated because the people that are gonna the smees and the people that are going to be put in this data in or updating and checking I guess verifying the data are already full-time jobs so this is gonna overwhelm them a little bit so let them do a little bit at a time and I've seen that work real successfully yeah I think that limiting your IP range to not taking in your full network all at once maybe just picking a handful of IPs and seeing what it does first I really think that feeding a dev environment obviously I know some people have not done that in my experience they just throw everything into production and I was like well is there okay but if you can get an idea for what it is that you're gonna get because if you've never experienced populating a CMDB before you're not gonna know until you start populating whatever it what it what it is you may have to cut out of your discovery process what you don't want to intake what you don't want to build configuration items for how how do you want your because it's going to populate both asset management and your configuration management database so what do you want to be see is that you don't want to be assets but may fall into the same CI class which may be a whole different topic and how how do you want that stuff to look and really I think that if you get a small data set and really see what all gets brought in some of the stuff you might be able to know right away that you don't want but there's going to be things like ports network cards that are gonna populate yep and if you don't want that data and you're like well what am I gonna do with a port information and it might be useful to you I don't know but but I feel like there's there's a level of granularity that's there whenever you are discovering data automatically and discovering information in your network that you really have to think am I going to put anything against this from an incident to a change or should I put it at a higher level and that kind of stuff if you start with a small subset if they populated see what you get refine do it again I agree I would definitely do all this in a dev system if you can mm-hmm and it doesn't matter if you're doing service now's discovery or you're pulling data from any kind of system I would definitely do small sets see what comes in just exactly like you said mm-hmm so I agree I've worked with both discovery and another discovery tool that was used to populate the CMDB and honestly because I had such a bad experience with discovery because it was just turned on let's give it you know let's give it a decrease I wasn't there for that process I walked in after the fact and was like I don't even know where to begin to clean this up literally this there's like 750,000 CIS and it really wasn't that big of a company and I was the only configuration but you know I I so I always felt like my experience with an external discovery source and being able to have more control over what I fed into the system outright worked better but there was a lot of disadvantages to that as well because I didn't get software in applications I didn't get all of my relationships there were some of those that had to be manually built and that was a real pain because guess who got then guess who got a good job but doing that was all the hardware people and they didn't like that so it was just yet something else that they had to fill their time with like they weren't busy enough but yeah that's I can see the benefits of both situations where you have a lot of control around something that you're bringing in from an external source but it's limited and what you're able to get out of it whereas discovery is going to fill you with a lot of information and that's great and it's going to populate both of your major tables and asset CMDB but at the same time you're really gonna have to take a good view at it and refine that information down right I would say that new before you turn on Discovery you need to learn a lot about discovery because you can throttle that stuff down but a lot of times companies like you had the experience and my first experience was discovery was the implementer just turned it on and pulled in everything now they were instructed to by the upper management but there are a lot of things that you can do with discovery and other imports but discovery itself you can limit what it does pull in but you need to learn that upfront because it does not it's not real intuitive you have to go in and configure that stuff now that they have a wizard that helps you it's a little bit better but yeah yeah I agree and I've actually worked in systems that had discovery that populated and then had three or four other scanning software's on the network that also updated and the seem to be so that's always fun when you have multiple sources which ones the primary and all that so which brings me back to kind of the next thing you know if what is better is it better just ease discovering is it better to use lots of different discovery tools or is it it or is it better to you know use other discovery tools and and bring it in for lots of other areas and not bring discovered was what is better it depends on what your whole objective is because if you want to use certain aspects of ServiceNow you have to have discovery if you want service mapping which is you know the shiny penny thing that every that you know executives like to see they they love the view that you get in service mapping because it's like okay here's how much stuff that I have but without discovery you have no service nothing right the two or two tightly wound up yeah but there's also like like the one call yet I was talking about you can do discovery but then you can also pull key information that you can't get from discovery from these other tools like network equipment in Poland a lot of information from the network equipment but through discovery but sometimes you can get other important information from the network management tool so pulling that in but so you don't want to populate all the data from all of them you just pull in important data that from other systems if you can't I mean you can populate everything but yeah I could see it being best if you pull just the important data that you can't get with other tools from those specific tools yeah I think if you make discovery your source of truth and you make that your primary but then you use other tools to supplement that information and I think that that's really the best way to be able to do it I don't think that like Brent was saying you can't get everything out of one tool that you would really like to see but you've got to know how to normalize it exactly and and if you if you don't have a way to coalesce very well or your transform maps are not set up great you know you gotta know how to coalesce your data to make sure that you don't get a bunch of duplicates right and there are toys out there that help normalize that data for you and I've used a couple of them they they work great but there are ways because that's extra money to get from the company and everything there are ways to do it if you're if you have time to concentrate and say this is going to be my golden record and then we're just gonna be pulling stuff from these other sources just to populate this one piece of data or whatever but that CMDB is something that really needs to be thoughtfully planned out and and really carefully designed rather than the default IT of wild-west everybody go try to figure out a solution and implement it that I see from a consulting standpoint is that a lot of times CMDB is being asked to be implemented to fix a lack of planning to begin with so you have one of those events where data center goes down and nobody knows what applications are running on the on the network and so all of a sudden see NDB becomes a priority when I wasn't before and then everybody's like turn it on turn discovery on let's get everything let's pour everything in I don't know maybe that's just my experience with people wanting to implement it but what do you guys think wait I T being reactive and not proactive every IT person I've ever met is extremely strategic I will say I agree completely having discovery as your base part and having bringing in additional data from other tool sets that you need whether it's SolarWinds or Active Directory or anything that you can't get somewhere else is it's extremely helpful I think the quality of data that I see come out of discovery is better than than the data that I seeking from other systems because when I look at the data coming from other systems I often see a lot of junk and how can I and find a way to weed those out but to get the junk no matter what system really I mean even discovery can pull in junk if you don't have it configured right it's the same as any other tool if you have SCCM pulling things in you get you don't get everything because they have clients that are always not always I shouldn't say always broken but there are a lot of times those clients are broken so you're not getting that data there's Tivoli clients is typically around anymore anyways totally clients to do things so I data is just gonna be sort of could be broken you just have to have someone verifying that data quite a bit well and I often see that some things are updated manually in other systems and then brought through to ServiceNow for automated process and that kind of defeats the purpose those are always fun you need to make sure that it is discovering it and when I find that we run discovery it's actually discovering it so yes it can bring in some but it's that's in the system it's not that somebody put there right and so that's that when I what I see pretty often is that I pull in you know as SCCM and there's a whole bunch of data that was manually entered or flex era or anything like that and they're not using the scanning tools on their side properly but they're using it as their source of record but they're all manual inputs well at that point the pity you're bringing in is yes this is fairly useless if it's not at least 80% in my opinion you know quality so I guess that's kind of why I what I see from pulling from external systems but versus pulling from actually discovery I have a quick question because normally Jason asks the questions but I might ask one how do you determine what information you want in for each of the sea-ice some we've kind of said you know you have to plan but mm-hmm the sea-ice themselves yeah the attributes have how do you see people actually doing that or is that a configuration manager should be suggesting that or do the do you see the business suggesting this is what we want to do I would think that it would be the subject matter experts that would define what it is that they want the configuration items underneath under each there under their own individual like umbrellas what do they want that to look like I think that you universalize it to some degree like you don't want your windows team and your Linux team saying two different things just make your servers look the same but what do you need from a desktop perspective how what is what would that look like and maybe collaborate on that between each different subset of configuration items I mean me personally I'm a data junkie so I'm like give me if whatever is on the server I don't care I want to know all of it really important unless the data is and the problem is if you the one person one piece of data is important you talk to somebody else something else is important it's hard to find a good balance between there isn't it I think that you start you do it the same the CMDB you start with as little data as little attributes as possible and then you know expand out from there my suggestion is to look at if specially if you're looking at it from a service management perspective start with the data that that the service desk needs to troubleshoot problems so if I give you a ticket on a certain asset what data do you have to know about that asset in order to do anything useful with it that way we're saving them time gathering information calling the user back and asking for questions but that's just from a service desk service management's for 50% there are some stuff that just comes naturally and easily when you're pulling from server data that you can populate fairly easily in quickly and so it's hard to not hard to say well I can crab that like in two seconds when I'm grabbing everything else why don't I in sometimes it's just both down to you know it's easy so let's put it in there for now but I think it the the better act of valor is take what your business side ones the the the experts and the people using is so you're talking about the server team and the service does and you talk about what you want you talk to desktop and you come to kind of an agreement that seems to be what works best for me but it takes a lot of work because they often want such drastically different things and I think that because a lot of times those two areas are dealing with different types of things I would get if it's coming down to what's on a server and what goes in what attributes are populated into a server ci I'm gonna give the leverage to the team that's actually supporting the servers and responsible for the servers before I give leverage to a team that may be supporting it I mean that code that goes back to your ASCII chart like who gets more votes that's the team that's gonna be responsible for it is the team that really needs that information and there may be a lot of information that's not useful in that but I whenever I think of that I want to know what hardware is on there I would like to know the operating system and all of that kind of stuff and whatever points are useful to them being able to find that information out and put it into a single place that they can see it right it's a okay so I'm going to take that into consideration when we're building this out they can you know a higher level of consideration for what they want right so that does mean that there is some give-and-take there somewhere well it may take more configuration depending on what type of servers you have to be able to get that information in some areas than others because WMI is better at pulling information out of their servers and you're gonna get through and I just drew blank Linux or yes or your three Linux or you know me you're just not going to get the same quality and they're all the data values that you're gonna get on an on Windows server as you will on a Windows server because W and I will give you a lot of really good information right exactly I also suggest to my sneeze and everybody and this might be just because I admin the tool most of the time and don't want to deal with all of it but they should be monitoring and checking or no be wanting to collect the information that there actually going to use don't put things in there that oh you know once every 27 years we might look at this data or whatever and you know really think about what you want to actually store in your in your CI and make sure it's stuff that you know is going to be useful not you know you know every 27 years we have to reboot this machine or whatever I don't know I'll stop my head but you don't need to know what the color of the server is that's it yeah think about whenever you're making that case is that every piece of data that you put in to a record and ServiceNow has the potential to slow it down right and it also is something you have to maintain and you know everybody I mean I know that I've not I don't think I've ever had stellar you know instantaneous performance in any ServiceNow instance that I've been in and a lot of times it's because the database is huge yep and whenever you're gonna populate a CMDB especially with a tool like this every if you don't plan every aspect of what it is that you're gonna populate that table with and in all of its sub tables then you are going to significantly impact the performance of your instance to go earlier I I made the the whole joke of just turned discovery on and let's scan everything the client that I was with that did that they have ended up with 3.5 million CI objects and so yeah there seem to be anytime you click on anything is so low because it's having to go through all that that is ridiculous yep yeah and you have to in here's a thing you have to know how each one of those fields and if you don't know we're talking when we talk about attributes think of the feet that the form each field each each thing about it each Pepa sawfish things that is connected to all those things are attributes right and so each one of those you have to figure out how am I going to populate this is it going to be populated automatically through discovery or if it's not in discovery how am I gonna populate it am I going to have to mainly populate this and but no matter which way you do it you need to Beit you need to understand that there is a process to each piece of that data and you need to understand what the process is to make sure that it stays up today yep a lot of discovery tools will update things for you and that's where you cut you do have to be careful if you're doing some manual intervention of discovered items because whenever it gets discovered again it's probably going to overwrite what you manually updated one of the things that I've used in the past that was really useful for validation and it put the onus on a lot of other people that were more experts or had ownership of the systems with the certification tasks it's a little it's it's a little jam and ServiceMaster I don't know is widely used but you can assign certification tasks to individuals and we always did it automatically so whenever a new item was brought into the CMDB there was a routing based on location based on type or I'm sorry class and it would send to a certain individual and they would go in there make sure everything was right and if there were manual things that had to be updated like assignment groups we did approvals based on our CIS and things like that then they could they had a temporary CMDB admin type role that was for the life of the certification tasks and once the certification task was closed they could no longer manually update that CI except or at least the important fields that we didn't want them to update because if people updated the approval to the approver group it really rocked my world [Music] you know because then you start getting into compliance issues and all of that but so we use that we leverage those certification tasks and it was a great way to be able to get people to take some ownership of the configuration items and to not put it all on one person because you know there was me and one other person that did all of the CMDB work for the most part at least full-time and it kind of spread the wealth as far as hey you know you had ten new servers populate this week here's your certification tasks you do two of them a day and then you're done and it doesn't take that long to go in there kind of populate here's what we got or change anything that you might want to change and then and then you're done and that's a really great way to be able to validate your data and kind of give it to people that know what the data should look like right exactly absolutely so the question now I have is we've got that we've got the data in there we've got it all figured out we've we have now got a solid CMDB we're gonna stop and this is great we're done we don't ever have to look at it again right exactly no there has to be it's a living living document but a living database that data has to be updated and verified and I don't know some set interval I can't say there's a defined one because each company could be different so you'd have to define that and do spot checks and stuff like that stuff I it's a living database that needs to be updated I think another I think that you probably need to I don't know maybe correct me if I'm wrong but a CI should have a life cycle correct yes and so you should you should when you're setting it up you should also be planning what the life cycle for each type of CI is going to be yeah I mean it's really important and what it's equally important I think is that you just understand that it's a continual improvement kind of thing right that you're never going to be done don't ever think you're done because when you think you're done you're not and you will you will regret thinking you're done it's a it is a continual project you're always going to need to adjust add do something different make sure everything is working verify things and that's why you need a CMDB manager at least one at least one that'd be nice depending on the size of your CMDB I mean you can't have one person managing a million see eyes not without some type of committee I mean I've been there so it's it's it's a lot for one person to undertake as a CMDB on their own I think that having a number of people that are knowledgeable of architecture is really good to be able to do that or at least having enough people that did it have dedicated time to a CMDB to where you can allocate you know 160 hours of personnel a week I remember whenever a previous company I was at whenever they were first beginning their CMDB process they brought in a consulting company and a consultant their consulting company said well you need at least four people they never had four people for just the CMDB and they had one and then whenever we reworked they had two and the second was me but you know that's that's that was the recommendation from the experts and that never people just don't think that well it doesn't really take that much I mean it really does this may need some maintaining it quality C and DB is a lot of work yeah they also here's the other thing that I don't understand about a lot of that is that they don't listen to the people that they hire as experts they're like okay so listen here you need this and they're like we're gonna take half that you know it's like no no no you need what you need and you need it for a reason you need it for quality if you want quality you need to be able to properly staff your company and in that a lot of well a lot of companies don't see that that until something has really gone wrong and they're like okay well where's this data well you didn't maintain it and your seem to be so get the white while get your white board out and start trying to discover it now about you know urgency and as a reactive sense whenever a company is like well we didn't really put the money behind the CMDB that we should have or we didn't think it was important but now that we've had a major event then suddenly it's super important and we need it yesterday by tomorrow morning at 7:00 there's another disaster and it's all moved over to something else yes yeah well and the thing is I find that it happens often when they get fined by government agencies because they they they didn't live up to some sort of criteria that is given in either HIPPA or you know you know one of the other laws that govern IT and govern other types of medical and and financial information and then the different kinds of laws that pertain to that and they get fined and then they go we got to fix this and they don't know what to do the only good thing that comes from that is that any time that you pull that information out again it's like well but that's a that's a insert whatever compliance you want to insert here you know and then you kind of have a chin there but you know all of it comes down to the business and this is my experience but the business sees IT as they don't see us as enablers they see us as cost centers and yes we are but we don't provide they don't see us as providing profitability or enabling the user base to be able to be more efficient at their job and I feel like IT needs to be seen as not just some massive costs in what you're not gonna live without tech this is it's 20/20 every you're sending people home or I mean if it weren't for tech done word do it we're recording this in the middle of quarantine yeah right then we wouldn't be able to do what it is that a lot of us are doing right now we wouldn't be able to work from home we would be cut all these companies would be losing tons of money or wouldn't be able to send their employees home to be safe because you don't invest in tech if you invest in tech then you get the best opportunities for your employees to be able to do their job to be able to be the most efficient that they possibly can be and that's why whenever we say things like well you need four people to manage your CMDB how efficient do you want your hardware people to be how efficient do you want your helpdesk people to be and the reason why we tell you that is because you can't have one person spending 40 or 50 hours a week managing this many configuration items if you put the money into it now you will to return on it long-term and you'll have quality data absolutely and and it's and it's crazy to me because we could constantly see the same thing over and over and over that they look at service now and they go oh well that's gonna cost money it's it's the you know software asset management you know or one of these other programs every time you put something else in your instance and put something else and connect it to everything else your value of the service now goes up but the efficiency of your employees in the amount of time you save them is huge service now makes work easier for everybody and that saves time and time is money you want to save your company money save them time you want to say long time go get service now there's definitely responsibility on upper management and the c-suite and everything to stop being when it comes to goals for IT and for things like that and to seeing IT as a call center there's also a responsibility on the IT side of things IT people need to spend some time learning what's important as far as metrics go to the business and what the business's strategic goals are doing and then if they can pull the information out of ServiceNow or their other tool that shows this is contributing to that metric then everybody else sudden starts talking the same language and people can maybe see things as okay this is a this is a cooperative effort rather than oh my gosh we still got to pay those IT people to do all this stuff and it just cost so much money you know so from both sides I think that there's a responsibility this is a whole nother podcast one of the biggest with IT for a long time is that they don't speak the same languages the business when the business doesn't speak the same languages IT and somebody got a bridge that gap I think that's where you get you know you get people and I love that role I mean that's whenever I came into my new role they're like well what is it that you really want to do is that I would love to get into enterprise architecture because that's the people that bridge that gap they have to understand the business side and they have to know the technical side and they have to know how to speak the language in both worlds it's a hard thing to do to know how to speak to the business side and to speak the technical language and it seems like the more somebody knows on the technical side I know this is gonna sound horrible but it is it is harder for them to explain it in the language that the business people can understand so the the in the more time that you spent doing leadership and management stuff it becomes and not been NIT it's hard to speak that language I think the the balance is somebody you know like the honestly like any of us on the call we've all been both leadership and technical skill stuff and so we understand both sides very well so it's hard but it is hard to find people honestly like us like like you and Brent and Justin and Randy you guys are all extremely accomplished in what you in your field and what you do so you know that's that's the thing is it though people like you guys are not easy to find well it's the you know shameless plug here for but that's the reason why if people ask you why do you have an IT company and a leadership development company both why are you running those two different seemingly different things this is the reason because if a company can get its strategy and its technical implementation aligned with the business principles then it can save so much money increase efficiency increased productivity increased profit you know I mean just everything flows better if the communication is there and somebody's got to teach people how to do that communication right absolutely absolutely all right guys awesome this was fun I think we've still got a lot of seem to be topics to talk about we've talked a lot of horror stories about seem to be on this as well and I think that you know when you go back to your original question about people saying why do I need to see a DVR CMDB is not important some my experience I've seen people the reaction is they've heard these horror stories and they've heard how bad things can be so before we sign off the question can see Andy be be something that you implement without killing everybody and get benefit from incrementally in small steps it's hard even with the the disaster stories that I've been talking about they have had successes that have gone along with their so you seem to be the one with 3.5 million they still have a great application and server and data center seem to be they just need to work on the other stuff so it can be successful and yeah we've had some disaster stories talking about but yeah there I've seen it done right where they've done the legwork to begin with and they've been identified and they've met with all of the different parties and they figured it out what's needed matter of fact working with somebody now that they seem to have been doing that all correctly and now that's a matter of where do we get the data how to get it in there and when it's done even though it won't be perfect it still will be good I agree I think that you can have a lot of success but I think ultimately you have to be realistic you can't go into a new CMDB project you've got to look and say well we're gonna have it live in three months or six months you've got to look at your staffing you've got to look at how much data you have to intake and by that I mean like roughly how many data centers do you have how many nodes within those data centers just kind of getting a general idea and then and then start thinking about a really actual realistic plan about how you're gonna go about it and not expect miracles to happen in a month or two or even six maybe even a year depending on how big of an organization you are if you go into it with realistic expectations and you create a good plan you can have a successful CMDB implementation regardless of I mean ideally if you have a ton of data centers or you have a lot of nodes you have a substantial amount of staff that you can put around it but if you're gonna put one person there then understand that they're you know it's just gonna take longer so I guess is there value that you derive though along that journey that your long journey or - your long journey before you go - that just I mean one thing to keep in mind is it's not just the ServiceNow team when you're talking about this right absolutely the infrastructure or whatever you would consider the people who not only the server admins but whoever is doing the past you know the service accounts you know you gotta you gotta get access to so it's not it's not like it's just gonna be a 1:1 part of the ServiceNow team can not deploy this it's gonna require cooperation from whatever departments you're wishing to learn more about their machines yes yeah absolutely so with that being said guys I really appreciate everybody being on the call um this has been a lot of fun do you guys have anything else you want to cover before we get out of here I'm glad Kathy came that's what yeah no problem I mean I I wouldn't want to do it again personally I was saying earlier that I haven't had coffee for like two months and then I was on a call with one of the managers over our team at around 11:00 and I couldn't string together two thoughts and I was like if I'm gonna do this podcast tonight I really have got to have some coffee I wouldn't want to do an I love doing this I love talking about it because I think that it's there I I do have a lot of experience in it and I've seen that good and I've seen the bad and I've seen a lot of different things and I do love the idea of the CMDB but I wouldn't want to manage one every single day ever again because it is a little tedious it a really dedicated special very involved that enjoys it kind of person yeah a person that really enjoys it right after a while oh yeah for sure I mean it was it was a great experience because like Brent said earlier the CMDB really is the foundation of at least the ITSM platform portion I think it I think it expands way into the other applications that you can stack on top of service now in the ITSM in the now platform but you know the sandy BD is really when I was managing it I called it the backbone of ServiceNow I said without a quality CMDB you're not gonna have quality data anywhere else and so I've got to have this data yeah well business insight leadership has to have this tool it makes everything better the board but it is hard it is hard to do and it's hard to maintain but it is but it is very much worth while yes okay alright guys well again everybody think thanks for joining us we really enjoy getting here and talking to everybody and then and haven't you guys listen remember you know get us up on LinkedIn send us messages let us know if you have questions we are going to cover this again in another podcast subjects we're going to go deeper into some of the more technical stuff so please send us your questions let us know what you want to hear what you want to do and we will do everything we can to help you in any way we can so LinkedIn message us we are putting out a video coming up soon that has audio and video where we're explaining an integration look at that up and YouTube as well but I appreciate everybody being here Brent Justin Kathy Randy YouTube thank you guys so much oh all right thank you thank you we want to thank our flagship sponsor for this show the sharp stone group LLC sure stone is your source for all of your service now needs implementation development administration strategy and architecture contact the sharp stone group today at info at sharp stone group comm or 405 five nine four zero one hundred we'd love to answer your questions or have you on the show contact us at service sharp at sharp stone group comm or find our LinkedIn info in the notes additional sponsorship opportunities are available you you