thank you guys for joining us to insight live with cirno solutions I am Tim Lee I host things from time to time whenever we can and I'm joined today by my distinguished colleagues why don't we go ahead and give me tell me your name tell me where you're from and give us a little bit of background with your ServiceNow experience sure I'll go first Tim thanks my name is Jeff Marlowe I am based out of Chicago Illinois I've been working on the platform for approximately I think this year is my 11th year so worked on most of the most of the modules obviously do have quite a bit of experience and expertise within the CMDB I have worked quite extensively an asset management as well so that is another area of interest of mine but yeah really really enjoy that you know the content we're going to discuss today so I really looking forward to chatting with you awesome and I guess hi everyone my name is Blake Davis I am from a little town called Dothan Alabama I've been doing service now for about I guess 7 years or so now pretty much extensively handling uh you know the CMDB asset management software asset management as well as you know discovery and service mapping those are kind of always been my focuses as I've gone through yeah well thank you guys for joining us I really appreciate it I know that this is your first time you've been with Cerner for a while but this is your first time actually joining us for one of these podcast events and this is I think the perfect topic for us to have you guys join us for the first time so you know we really appreciate it obviously today we are talking about healthy CMDB happy CMDB we wanted to do this topic because we hear so many of our customers say that the CMDB is the heart of their service now operation but more often than not that it may not be in the state that they consider to be ideal so we want to talk a little bit more about what is an ideal state for CMDB and if if there is work that can be done you know what are the goals for us to to move on that so I'll go ahead and just get some quick housekeeping out of the way a question that we get quite often are these sessions recorded yes they will be emailed to you it is recorded and we will be posting it on to our website Serna solutions.com as well as the YouTube page on the cert solutions page on YouTube if you guys can go there if you like this type of content check out and see some of the other podcasts that we've done subscribe if you want to see more of those videos and hit the notification if you want to be alerted of when we have new content that's put up you can also find a lot of news about Serna on LinkedIn so that's a really great place if you like these types of webinars or podcasts or even want to see some of the other type of work that we're doing definitely go to LinkedIn and check out Serna solutions there and then if you do have questions just go ahead and use the questions feature not the chat but the questions feature on the GoToWebinar panel don't wait until the end to ask your questions as soon as you have it go ahead and let us know this is really what I think is the best way to get value out of this type of session is for us to see what types of questions you have while we're talking about them and then see if we can steer the conversation to help you out and really get the unique information that you need that's specific and let's just go ahead and set up what we're going to be talking about today so very first and foremost we want to define what CMDB health actually means we're going to talk a little bit more about what a plan could be for maintaining a healthy CMDB and if you're CMDB is not perfect how are you going to treat that not treat in the medical sense not in a at a kit sense of what to do when you're CMDB is less than healthy or we'll just say inefficient for right now so let's break the ice let's talk a little bit more with a simple question what does CMDB health actually mean and Jeff I'll throw that to you first yeah sure so it's a kind of a loaded question a big question but an important one so if it starts with with three sort of main areas data inputs right how do we get data into the CMDB and obviously just this of podcast is predicated on data coming into your CMDB obviously we'll talk about about this briefly but the second piece is managing the CMDB not just loading that a kind of a set it and forget it mentality but loading the data once you've loaded the data in making maintaining and managing it so having someone responsible for managing the data once it's imported and then third and almost most important is usage how is it folded into the other process area so you can spend and a lot of clients spend a long time implementing or loading data into their CMDB whether it be discovery spreadsheets SCCM they're they're you know tens or hundreds of methods to import into the CMDB but really if you're not using your CMDB what is it good for so those are three main areas to indicate CMDB health and if you're importing if you're importing data with a regular frequency you're maintaining or managing your data with your regular frequency and you're using your data with a regular frequency but generally means you have a fairly healthy CMDB now they're they're obviously ranges of health but those three three topics are really critical and Blake I mean obviously you know you've worked with a number of customers and they're CMDB can you tell me would you say that any customer you can define their CMDB as one hundred percent healthy have you ever seen that in your in your years absolutely doc there is there is kind of a term in CMDB where we're always chasing perfection no-nobody CMDB is perfect but we always try to chase that profession so we can achieve an excellence emt-b you know being able to kind of go in is it's an ultimately subjective term for what do you define as you know by seeing bee bees working for me you know it's working for my organization sure yeah yeah okay and I think that you know kind of i we all discussed an analogy I think we'll just throw it out early that we can call back on it when needed but you know in our earlier conversations I know that we talked about how some people think of their CMDB as kind of like a car you buy a car and you get the oil changed every once in a while and when it's needed to be fixed you bring it into the shop but in reality or CMDB is really more like a garden in the sense that if you if you're not working on it regularly and you turn around and look back at it it's gonna have a lot of stuff there that you didn't want there or it's gonna you know not be where it needs to be so I mean can you guys speak to that a little bit more mean is that is that a feature that you think most customers are aware of or do you think that in most cases it's sort of the earlier example there yeah but I can touch on the diversity so I think most mature organizations they consider the the implementation the loading of cis as kind of the the most most exhaustive or highest level of effort of the processes whereas once you've loaded the the CIS into your C and DB that's when really the the level of effort begins right you have to and we'll get into this later you have to have a dedicated resource you have to make maintain it so it's not about it's not about getting all of your boiling the ocean as the term we like to use a lot it's not about loading all of your CIS it's about loading GIS using them and maintaining them so I think a lot of clients tend to overlook the maintenance piece or tend to underestimate the level of effort that it takes to to really maintain it mm-hmm so why is it important I mean we talked a little bit about the you know why do you even have it but what's the so what for CMDB health in general i mean what what are people giving up by not focusing on the health of their CMDB sure I can I can start to answer that and like if you want to fill in so really it's about so I know that the concepts of ROI is one that's brought up quite frequently with the CMDB and to be honest it's it's generally worth the effort not necessarily I mean asset management tracks the the inventory the the the financial cost of your equipment but the really the the large value is reducing mean time to resolution in that if we're we haven't folded in the CMDB into incident problem change and we're logging incidents where service desk is doing their job they're tracking incidents they're resolving their closing incidents they're opening doing root cause analysis you're logging change requests but they're not collecting the appropriate configuration item then we're losing a lot of money and it's hard it's hard to to put a financial cost around that until it's been done until we're able to identify well this year now that we're tracking the the outages the impact of business for these configuration items it costed us it cost us this much but we were able to resolve it in a much shorter duration so that's a that's a big win is reducing mean time to resolution being able to resolve being able to identify the patches or the changes that are being applied to configuration items so when your end user calls in and the Service Desk is looking to resolve those incidents as quickly as possible they're able to identify you know these these pieces of equipment have have recently undergone change request and in all likelihood this is this is the root cause or this is where we will start our effort and the only other thing I would add to that as well is just in addition to why you know the RO is and all that stuff it's very important but also a healthy CMDB is worth the effort for your organizational maturity as your organization matures over time being able to automate and orchestrate a different task and you know set up automated remediation of problems before they become a call in before somebody is already contacted you know we already know about it and the only way we can accurately do that in service L is with a whole TCM DB mm-hmm so what about in terms of you know we talk about how accuracy is definitely you know part of the goal here but I mean when hold on we got a question here that I wanted to tie to that one specifically you know they say that defining health should be you know the accuracy of the data and how you know are we going to and we can either answer this now or later if that's possible but are we able to discuss you know how you discover software which is copied to the server meaning it's not registered or how do you know if your installed software hold on it cut off there that your installed software inventory is accurate is that something that we think we should cover now or is that something that we're going to go into a little bit later on in this in this session so the installed software and accuracy that that's kind of a bit of the softer asset management piece that we won't necessarily talk about today it certainly can be a separate topic but very valid and very useful just just I don't as it relates to the health and I don't know that it'll come up okay so a question though yeah more more along the lines of CMDB in practice so we we can cover that maybe offline if that's something that might help you out there but let's uh let's go ahead and move on a little bit more so we have some you know more visual content but just to kind of set up the topic here you know in terms of measuring measuring and maintaining that CMDB health I know that a lot of people have thrown off some questions about the health dashboard and ServiceNow and so I wanted to get into that a little bit here just to kind of set up the the concepts now this is obviously content that you can google and find this out but I want to dig a little bit deeper into each of these concepts with you guys and really understand some more real-world business applications for what these mean and why people should should be focused on this and you know I'm not trying to tell ServiceNow marketing how to do their job but I think you could have easily made this four C's I know that the the three-season an R is kind of a joke but that that relationships portion you could easily pick a word like connections or correlations but I don't know maybe maybe relationships is really just the best way that we can put this in here but let's talk about this a little bit more yeah Jeff can you I know that this was a portion thing I wanted to speak to specifically can you talk a little bit more about you know the dashboard and completeness and what this means directly for ServiceNow customers yeah absolutely and I know the CMDB health dashboard is an area that I know a lot of us are passionate about but I'm quite honestly very excited we haven't gotten in that in the 11 or so years it's been a while since we've had a nice nice present and this seemed to be all dashboard is really nice numerical representation of the the health of your CMDB or an organization CMDB now we'll get into the specific metrics here shortly but obviously just want to point out we you know that that GDP health is a bit subjective right what what matters to one industry doesn't necessarily translate to another so this seemed to be health forward out of box is very configurable and it's sort of vanilla so we'll talk a little bit about some examples some valid examples that you know we'll even assign some homework at the end here but you know what the first see here is completeness and the completeness metric is an aggregate of both required and recommended fields so when we say required fields what we're talking about is on the dictionary entry of a particular class so if we're talking about the computer class if you've made any number of fields required at the dictionary entry level it will be it will be identified here under the required or missing attribute so in general for clients that are that are starting out and they've just they're just implementing their CMD D maybe a phase 1 phase 2 we don't typically recommend using another term here recommend implementing the required field for a couple of reasons but primarily if we think of this this use case right so we've got someone in the service desk who is you know investigating an incident they've identified that they've done their job and identify the appropriate configuration item that is impacted and they've done the research they find out let's say the support group or the owned by or the managed by field is not populated but in their investigation they've identified the appropriate contact but we've actually gone in and said for all computers we need serial number to be a required field well if they go in the service sector service technician is going in to be helpful and fill that bit of information out what they can't because they don't know the serial number in that case so it's prohibitive in that sense for more mature organizations where they do have regulation and they manage the the input and the they manage the different attributes that may be less of a concern but becomes a little prohibitive to facilitate and allow your end users to update your CMDB now the other the flip side of that is making recommended attributes or making recommendations and this is actually unique so if you go into the CI class manager and you're managing a particular class so let's say let's take the example of computers and let's say we want to recommend that that the location is populated we want to recommend the serial numbers populated and let's say we want to recommend that the managed by is populated you can define recommended fields at each level at each class so in this case it's a little bit less prohibitive you still it still affects the same outcome eventually but it's a good kind of a gentle way to to work in to the the completeness health dashboard so those are the two metrics that that come that make up the completeness the next one is correctness and this is to make a call back to our our gardening reference a little less gardening a little more a lawn care the the there are three letters and rearrange them take an artistic license here to make up sod right so so for correctness we have staleness orphan and duplicate now staleness is really defined there's an out-of-box property that's defined effectively sixty days if your configuration item hasn't been updated in sixty days it's considered sale so you know that you can create staleness at again at the class level so you could say maybe my computers should be updated more frequently let's reduce that to thirty days or perhaps my maybe my Windows servers need to be thirty days and my network gear maybe every ninety days you can define stay on this at different different levels orphan is something that isn't defined out of box it's something that you do have to define and it's you know depending on the class you could say you know a configuration item so let's say maybe a Windows server without any relationships that would be considered an orphan CI because all of what what use is a Windows server if it's not related to maybe the applications that run on it or other infrastructure so maybe we consider that an orphan role so that can be one of the orphan rules that you define you can also say what if maybe we're not at the maturity level where we're defining relationships maybe a configuration item or computer is considered orphaned if it doesn't have a managed by field so maybe you indicate ownership by populating the manage price you can also define manage by being empty as an indicator of an orphan CI now the last of the last one here is duplicate and this one is less configure it's based off of the identification rules and the identification rules are configurable in themselves but you know consider the identification rules you know is based off of generally the fqdn the MAC address serial number those are indicators of uniqueness and if we find configuration items that have the same MAC address fqdn serial number then that may be an indication of a duplicate CI so that kind of makes up the correctness and then the last C is compliance and this is a little more to be honest this is a little more advanced so we'll kind of we'll go through this rather quickly but the audit the compliance dashboard is may stop mate based off of audit rules and the audit rules are very configurable one example would be if an industry requires that all computers running Windows OS have to have at least let's say a gig of ram you can define an audit rule to say anything under a gig of ram is out of compliance and fails the audit report you can do things like that the audit rules are very industry specific so that's again a bit more of an advanced concept but that's that's a another example of the compliance dashboard that clients will typically configure and again it's based off of class so you can define an audit rule for a business critical services you can define a audit role like I mentioned for Windows Windows workstations really the it really depends on the industry so that's effectively a the best example at least the most broadly applicable example you know we could we could define for compliance and then this last and final letter here our relationships and this this is is really a the same concept as the correctness so we use the acronym sod they only orphan and duplicate it's the same concept here but applied to relationships this is not configurable so really when you when you activate these scheduled jobs in your instance these will all there isn't a whole lot you have to do to configure these now if you don't have any relationships to find you're not going to see much information here but as you can see there's duplicate orphan and stale or stale orphan duplicate and and this is this would be considered so stale relationship would be any relationship where either the parent or the child configuration item hasn't been updated in a 60 day window so if either of the devices has been a hasn't been updated for a period of time that would be considered stale orphaned would be where the parent or child is empty and then duplicate would be based on the this isn't based on the identification rules this is where the parent child and type and I even think port where all four of those attributes are identical then that would be considered a duplicate so those are the four the three C's and four and one are because I want to jump back real quick just a little bit so sure obviously this is the main dashboard for CMDB health how and I know that we've already established this can be subjective to your unique organization but in your opinion how do you use these scores how can you tell what score is a good enough score for your organization and how to you how do you maintain that decision with for your organization so so I think the two-thirds rule right so roughly 66 percent i my my my indicator of success is usually achieve for 70 to 80 percent now if you're at a hundred percent restrict your rules create some more regiment or complicated so add required recommended fields to your completeness scorecard define some orphan rules make them a little more strict you don't want to see a hundred percent on here at all times because that's an indicator your defining your not defining orphan rules you're not defined illness rules you're not defining recommended field so achieve so as you improve as the score increases to 80% 90% implement some more recommended fields you know add some more staleness or orphan rules so that that number comes down and try to increase and try to increase usage of the CMDB so you know kind of incremental improvement is what I'd recommend okay so I think that's that's a really interesting point because I think that for you know when we already got started talking about how this isn't a frequent activity this is something that's really more of a balancing act than anything else to have a high a really high score isn't that means you're not catching problems right and and that if your score keeps kind of going up and up and up that's an opportunity for you to improve as opposed to or to create more strength and more health in your CMDB as opposed to a sign that just everything's fine is that what you're saying yeah yeah I don't I don't recommend looking at this seem to be a health dashboard as a we're not trying to ace a test here what we're trying to do is use it and if we're at the sixty to sixty to seventy percent that's an indicator that we're succeeding and if we see areas of in this case right we are audit we're failing it's kind of audit there's an opportunity to improve the audit the compliance activities so there's always rooms for always room for improvement and really we're not trying to ace the CMDB health dashboard we're trying to hit that two-thirds and and succeed okay and I know that you know we talk about best practices and that's a lot of the questions that we had I know that you know there are there's a subset of people in this field that kind of bristle at the term best practices because there's really no one way to best practice but it sounds like you know there really are some some better practices or good practices that the people can be reviewing as they as they kind of grow and mature their CMDB practice what about in terms of you know the challenges of using the dashboard and you know Blake can you talk a little bit more in terms of you know what what are some of the first steps to populating it and what are some of the challenges that you see you know customers have been really getting this tool off the ground yeah I mean one of the big things is you know setting it up to finding your standards like when you look at a CI for the first time and you look at your computers you look at your servers you know it's from your organization you need to make that determination and it's this is not something that a ServiceNow administrator's gonna do this is something that you know your Windows administrators are gonna help you with these are the people who care about these CIS they're the ones that are gonna sit down and help you define those standards when you set up that health dashboard now those are the people you want involve to say okay we're in our first phase you know you know like Jeff said we're not doing any required fields but what are the recommended fields that we care about you know what are the things that you know on every CI we want to see and getting they're getting their input and getting their involvement it can be a challenge depending on your organization but it's also incredibly important to make those rules as accurate as possible to make those numbers and make that tool as valuable as you can one of the other things is reviewing the dashboard you know there is no automated system that's gonna tell you hey this is bad this is bad you know somebody has to come out and take a look at this thing periodically you know we need a human going in reviewing this data looking at the problems and making a you know creating actions to remediate those steps you know be it processes remediation tasks that won't dive into putting together a reconciliation rules all those fun things those are all parts of someone having to go in and actually look at this data and that's what you know Jefferson's mentioned it earlier you know we talk about this concept of hiring into dedicated you know configuration manager that's it's a valuable person to have in your team who cares about this data much like you would have an asset manager and I want to get into that more specifically but I'm thinking more in terms of you know the setup process I know that we we had talked earlier about how and you touched on this just a little bit but I'm wondering if you can go into a little bit more detail you know this is not an automated process it's specifically the setup I mean what what kind of process should someone be going into just you know when they open up this dashboard and see that some of these fields are just completely empty how how do they go from from kind of zero to a good starting point would you recommend you know the first thing I would say is just you know start with the outer box jobs you know that's a good baseline just run uh setting up those initial jobs from letting the scans run just to build your baseline and say okay what are what are we even remotely looking at you know and then from there you know like I said before sitting down with your team's their CI owners and saying what are the things that we recommend are populated and then building those rules into the dashboard itself you know this is this there's a bit of setup here and it's not going to be perfect the OtterBox ones are you know they're basic there they're standard but every organization is going to be different so you know customizing that dashboard customizing those rules customizing those jobs to care about the fields that you want to track that's that's kind of one of those initial set up processes that you have to do to get the most out of the tool and Jeff we had a question about you know what are some of the failure causes and the dashboard is specifically on the completeness tool yeah so the failure causes as in you know why isn't the completeness implemented or rising the completeness defined we'd have to assume probably what they mean here unless they yeah yeah yeah yeah sure so typically that the completeness though follow-on to Blake's point and this kind of comes up I don't want to give too much of a spoiler in the homework section but you know really focusing narrowing in on on critical classes so again not trying to boil the ocean we're not going to define a broad abroad recommended or required field for all classes I would target a few select classes and then to Blake's point grab the windows server team sit down with them and say what do you what information do you find valuable or sit down with the Service Desk team and say when you're when you're tracking you know when you're when you're creating incidents and you want to get a hold who are you looking for so networking or working with the teams to identify key pieces of information to find those key pieces of information consider it you know those key piece of information is critical and then adding that to the to the to the recommended list of recommended fields and the CI class manager I think just to Blake's point you you run it initially you see you're at a hundred percent that's an issue in itself then you want to get that number again back down to about two thirds or even less define a couple of key classes that you want to refine or define recommended fields against and then run it again and and try to improve that number so let's say that your number is closer to fifty percent how would you recommend someone approaching that and improving that number yeah so so then start off with so if you're at fifty percent you know obviously if let's just take the simple assumption or simple approach that let's say we're we're defining the owned by as the only recommended deal now we're focused on computers and fifty percent of computers haven't owned by we have a simple use case well I was I would sit down and see if there's there's a way to either one populate the majority of those computers right let's say your computer's is about example Windows servers let's say for the fifty percent of Windows servers that are missing owned by canwe pre-populate 25% of those with a common owner right can we and then that goes back to is or is there a discovery source or an automated a source that we can actually pre populate those and then I kind of gets in the data certification plug-in but to remediate it's a it's a multi-phase approach but effectively you want to identify the class that is missing the majority of the that it has a poor CMDB health score and then remediate that class programmatically so whether that be a fine a data steward to to own those those owned by fields and that kind of gets into our next slide here but really the data certification plug-in tool is a really really effective way to take action on those that's for the MVP health yeah and I hope that answers your question but yeah you're absolutely right I think we are kind of definitely starting to get into this next slide here and Blake I know that you were kind of starting to get into that as well and so this is really you know the idea that once you see that your CMDB does need help and you see that there are areas that could stand some improvements and as we saw you know about a third of people are not really happy with with the health state of their CMDB this is really a good way for us to sort of create a framework for you and you know what I did here an R and 3ds so it is harder than it looks right so I could have done a better job but um yeah Blake why don't you go ahead and just kind of jump into these this information here and just so everyone knows we will be sending out along with the video the slide deck here so if this is kind of conserved as a cheat sheet for anyone you will have access to this in a PDF format after the after the presentation yeah totally so you know when we when we talk about like you know bringing that pruning that garden and bringing it back to hell you know how do we fix what we have out there how do we make things better you know these are kind of a couple of different ways that we usually see people try to approach if you can approach them one at a time multiple ways you know but generally it falls out into reconciliation which is the general concept of putting in reconciliation rules to automate some of these remediation tasks so you know for example Jeff's Jeff was talking about you know hey we've got a Windows server that doesn't have an owner okay well we can build remediation rules that automatically see that data see that problem and can go out and you know maybe drops an email out to the windows team and just saying hey he wants us like you know somebody needs to know or you can say you know somebody gets assigned a task and assign a task out to the windows team just to say go populate this data you know go do this in addition reconciliation this also helps us with removing different duplication nuclear CIS maybe see as it should be retired that have just not been moved into a certain state you know being able to validate all of that information with reconciliation rules at a pretty powerful tool the next way is data precedence so we see this I've seen this so many times it's not even funny multiple sources of truth everybody has on most organizations have you know two three four different things bringing data into CMDB you know between service valves own discovery tool SCCM there's tons of them out there but a lot of times we notice that people don't actually bother to take the time to set up data precedence rules and what these essentially do is they allow you to make a in define a source of truth and specifically which sorts of truth do you trust more so if you've got SCCM and service discovery for example and discovery is scanning all of these Windows computers and SCCM is loading that data in via the you know say the SCC I'm out of oxygen setting up the data precedents to say hey you know if discovery scans this thing we kind of trust what it says more that allows us to kind of remove that whole flip-flopping data precedence problem it also allows you to know hey these are the things that matter this is the source of truth that we care most about and you know when you've got multiple sources populating data one of the big problems you can see in your CV B is data just flopping back and forth constantly you know maybe as cesium has the CPU defined as and Intel you know whatever and discovery maybe has it actually as like this is an Intel i7 did you know so on for that like there are different words so the system sees them as different things so whenever each source runs they you know just essentially just paste data over one another over and over and over again and that data precedence helps us remove that problem as well as manage that problem and allows these multiple sources to interact better mm-hmm moving on to data certification this is actually a out of box plugin but it's not activated out of box you need to you actually do have to turn it on but it is an out of box plugin this is kind of a fun little tool that allows you to assign data stewards this is not necessarily you know a service an administrator and your seem to be in this trailer would be the ones to help configure this but this is not their job this is essentially allowing you to go out and assign third farah like essentially assign tasks out to individuals in your organization to validate and help you maintain that cdb you know as a you know as a ServiceNow administrator I have no idea for Windows servers data is actually correct I don't know if this is the correct supported by I don't know if this is correct owner or anything like that or just I don't know if this stuff has been updated in a while maybe you know the person who's marked as an owner isn't even an employee anymore maybe he quit a year ago so data certification allows us to set these things up for you know kind of going back in and certifying your data again not just from the sources of data that will bring in automated information such as CPU RAM and stuff like that but as well as manually intern information into your CMDB you know the Blake typical Quakers now you've mentioned that the data certification feature is out of box is that the same for reconciliation and data precedence or those features that you need to activate or how do those work specifically so reconciliation rules as well as data precedence I believe are both out of box and they are automatically turned on they're part of the CMDB class managers as well as CMDB management in general data certification itself is just a separate plugin that you have to turn on if you want to utilize it and it's it's fun because then you can set up essentially like quarterly or you know maybe you buy annually like you know reviews of your data just to help kind of keep that health dashboard up to date fight that 99% and also to fight that stale data marker you know if something's going stale that's a problem data certification helps you kind of make sure that at least somebody's looked at this occasionally and you know says hey okay this is still good mm-hmm the final piece is a dedicated admin and I think over the past few years me and Jeff have started harken this one a little bit more than we used to seem to be as a living breathing environment it is a garden it is something that has to be maintained because everything in ServiceNow is built off of it you know as your organization matures incident problem change automation orchestration all of these things that help your organization be lean fast Swift and make X credibly you know smart decisions are all based on that CMDB so having dedicated CMDB administrator you know manage all of these things learn data certification learn deena precedents help with the reconciliation of all the stuff manager health dashboard you know it can be it can be an incredibly intensive job and it's not something that you can literally you can just dump on someone and expect them to understand it you know a dedicated admin is usually someone that also knows ServiceNow least you know I would expect them to be a ServiceNow administrator certified but after that it's just a matter of learning the tools and learning the CMDB itself you know we mentioned here that it's a daily activity I mean would you say that that's true for every company or would you say that for some smaller companies or some smaller ServiceNow operations it's really more like a weekly activity or how would you define that I think it depends on the level of maturity of your organization as well as the size of your organization you know it can be a daily activity of 100% you know someone's coming in taking a look at that health dashboard in the morning you know making decisions you know working on reconciling the data working on maintaining the data certificate making sure all the data certified you know all of those things are daily activities but is it a full-time activity well that depends on how big your CMDB is you know maybe in phase one it's not but maybe in Phase two where you know hey we've only done Windows and now we're bringing in Linux and now we're bringing in all of our Mac devices and all that fun stuff you know maybe this becomes a bigger and bigger like as your CMDB grows the more time it takes to prune the garden grow yeah I know one analogy that that we make pretty frequent I think we actually heard it from a customer first is that a CMDB is also like a small child that this you know you turn away from it from for a short period of time and the next time you notice that it's there some some kind of hell has broken loose definitely you know thinking again about the garden it's it's if you spend one week away from your garden and you come back to it it's a completely different state than you expect so I think that that's probably one of the more controversial statements that we need to make though and this with this information here is that you know we talk about how hard it is to measure ROI for your CMDB and it's because you know so much of it is reliant on what it does but it doesn't maybe present immediate value and then we start saying you need a whole person to work on this now we're presenting it as more of a liability you know more of an expense for for the company but then when you turn around and think about what are you giving without a fully properly functioning CMDB you are going to have difficulty with automation you are going to have difficulty with you know outages happening and it's now instead of an ROA is you it's an opportunity cost issue what are you giving up by not maintaining this to its fullest extent so I think that's a great point I think it's it's probably one of the harder things so how would you recommend to someone that is telling their boss we need a full-time person on their CMDB how do you and this is probably a question that you guys can't answer how do you recommend that they respond and say to sell that value and understand that this is something that that the business is going to rely on million-dollar question so I think it starts with you know again identifying the the usage you know are you are we are we leveraging the CMDB do we have configuration items identified on all of our incidents some of our incidents none of our incidents you know that the less less you use your CMDB the more opportunity there is I think maybe the the question about how the the amount of time it would be required is initially upfront it's going to be it's going to certainly be a full time it's going to be likely daily as as things mature as as kind of you know that the CMDB becomes a little bit more you know you've laid the mulch down you've you've done all that it becomes a little bit less so I you know it's just like with any with any with any project you need a fully dedicated resource at least initially but beyond that I think it's a really hard and it's something we typically we've done with clients but it requires a lot of intimate detail with with the customer and with you know their history in the past you know how the CMDB has been used and not used so with the roadmap what our opportunities go ahead yeah it does you you just hit the day all the head just like roadmap like what are you going to use your CMDB for in the future you know what do you see yourself doing with ServiceNow like do you see yourself going into the automated space orchestrating some of your uh you know manual tasks taking some of that workload off your help desk by orchestrating a lot of these like you know fixes you know those are the types of things where you see maybe starts coming into play really heavily and having that guy around to make sure that all that works all the time and nobody has to go in and manually fix it yeah yeah absolutely hey guys you know what it's a right now it's about 10:00 till the end of the hour I do want to jump to a couple of other questions that I know that people asked but I want to point out some information that we will be handing out shortly after the podcast here so if if you are interested in some action items some tangibles that you can take away from from what we discussed I have included some homework here that you guys can if you're interested in any stage of the CMDB process either in just defining what your health is or trying to develop that plan for health or even if you're in a state where it's not healthy and you want to try to increase your score we've put some rough activities here Jeff since we are a little bit short on time is there anything that you want to point out that maybe we have not defined here in our conversation so far no I think just just to reiterate this right we're not boiling the ocean here that you'll you'll see on the homework for these pieces we want to identify you know are a class or two that we want to prioritize we don't want to try and prioritize the entire CMDB so that kind of goes that's across the board you know we want to focus you know incremental improvement so just just so just to drop that and I'm going to knowledge but everything else doing is pretty pretty straightforward here okay and so so we'll be handing that out a couple of questions I wanted to hop to since I know that everyone else may need to get back to their to their day-to-day jobs I know that we have someone that was mentioning that they are trying to work with the CMDB as far as integrations and that that's been a complication for them so since they're the Qualis and their service now are not integrated they're saying you know how would you approach configuration in that type of environment you know working with those disparate systems so I can Kenan yeah go ahead yeah well it's so-so call us and service now there there are integrations and not exactly clear on the specific integration that that isn't quite working but obviously with with vulnerability response there's a Qualis integration and the the goal kind of getting back to one of the pieces we talked about is identification rule is making sure that I think Qualis has a unique host ID there are a couple of unique identifiers is ultimately the we want to we want to find a source of truth and typically client you know defer to ServiceNow is the source of truth so when we're talking about kind of merging or dealing with disparate systems and you know merging disparate systems data we really want to identify a source of truth and make sure that we're we're coalescing on unique values and I think with Qualis in particular I think the host idea is is the unique identifier but it's kind of a separate topic and we certainly can talk offline about it but you know and this is this was true for yeah it would need to be integrated obviously for the CMDB to really do its job I would imagine correct yeah absolutely okay well Aaron yeah let's let's connect afterwards it sounds like we can talk a little bit more about that more specifically for you but we have a question right now you know what is the benefit of having discovery specifically versus SCCM for populating the CMDB I could I can take that it really just depends on like the data types you know SCCM is a really good tool for grabbing windows data you know it's all built off Windows architecture but ServiceNow discovery is it is a bit more broad you know it can scan all those Windows devices and at the same time you know we can pick up all the Linux data we can pick up all the networking gear you know each tool has its value I'd certainly don't I don't necessarily put one above the other ever I know really try to do that with any of the integration tools and different you know CMDB management tools out there maybe I might be a little bit biased because I have been doing discovery basically all of my ServiceNow career so I love discovery as a tool itself but uh you know you know that's data precedents it's really gonna come into play so take a look at the data that's coming from s you see I'm taking a look at the data that discovery is giving you and then compare them and decide know which one do you care about more which one looks more correct to you now you know obviously you know this is a service that cirno solutions provides i mean that's obviously you know part of why we're having the the podcast and you know in the spirit of WebMD when do you call the doctor you know when when is it something that you think that at what point do you think in the CMDB health it makes sense for you to work with a partner or work with an outside resource to try and come in and and bring things back to where they should be I think when you don't have a have a resource that understands you know your overall processes that's where you can start coming in and bringing you know that's the value we bring to the table is know we come in we learn about your organization we learn about your processes and we can make recommendations based on our experience yeah and I also think one of the benefits of involving outside vendors is sometimes it's easier to have a an external vendor come in and you know exact change you know it's sometimes easier to pull in that resource and and if maybe some practices or use the term good practices aren't aren't adopted or an enforced sometimes easier to have a new face to you know make prescribed changes or you know try to shake things up a little bit so that's that's usually a case where you know where it's helpful to have you know since often come in and talk about you know we've we've probably Blake and I collectively have have done over a hundred implementations we've seen it you know a hundred ways to do to fail to succeed so that's obviously some of the benefits we bring in different perspectives though sure okay any other questions that people have I think we've covered a fair amount of them but if I have not answered your question right now and you know feel free to throw it into the into the questions again in case it got lost in the shuffle we're seeing a lot of activity coming through here okay hold on I do see one more question I want to make sure that I hop onto that one oh so um so we had a question specifically about is there any value in adding work stations you know laptops desktops etc not as assets specifically but as CI yeah absolutely I mean I think adding workstations or computers as the eyes is very valuable you know especially with an incident management granted you likely won't won't you know apply many changes to the specific work stations but certainly the more information you have the more knowledge of your environment the better I know you know we've we've done we've had some discovery issues with work stations based off of when you know but based on when they're online when to scan those devices but I think there's it's very useful or useful have them definitely a long term for those I've seen customers that have done you know remote installations because they have those work station data in them all in their system they know who has each laptop so someone can go out into your service in your Service Catalog request a software and you know orchestration can automatically install that on their computer zones they have the approvals so yeah and another thing to getting into software asset management we're talking and we're tracking device based entitlements that that's the place where you can leverage leverage workstation so there Dyan oh yeah all right well everyone I think I think we did it we're right up until the hour I want to thank everyone who joins for for joining us today I know that you know in this holiday season you know it's sometimes it's not always easy to take take an hour out of your time to to focus on the improvement of your company and how your understanding of what ServiceNow can do but we absolutely appreciate everyone that's that's joined us we will be doing more of these events so like I said at the top make sure that you go to Serna solutions calm and take a look at our resources to see what other kind of events we have follow us on LinkedIn join us on on YouTube if you want to see some of the other content that we've been doing and we greatly appreciate it Blake Jeff you guys have been very generous with your time thank you so much for lending your expertise today pleasure thank you thank you personally blast alright guys well thank you so much everyone if you have any more questions feel free to reach out and we look forward to seeing you next time thanks a lot everyone