Let's look at the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database or CMDB to see what it does and how to manage it in the now platform. First, a quick primer. A CMDB is a data repository used to store information describing technology, assets and configuration items, or CIs, across the enterprise. CIs represent items under configuration management such as servers, containers, cloud resources, installed applications and services. A CMDB also contains the relationships between CIs and how they integrate with each other. CMDB have been around for several decades, but how the ServiceNow CMDB gets populated and the use cases it supports have evolved beyond the traditional scope. On the Now platform, The CMDB has evolved from being populated manually to automatically in near real time. It provides a single source of truth that aggregates data from many different sources into one comprehensive data model. The traditional use of CMDB operations is accommodated and expanded with the broad ecosystem of products on the Now platform. These include security management, asset management, cost management, change management and incident management. The ServiceNow CMDB contains up to date CIs, starting from the Physical technology layer and extending into the Application Services layer. This application and application service layer is comprised of logical items that describe how the physical configuration items work together as application instances, systems or microservices. Application services provide visibility into how the discoverable infrastructure works together, and what the dependencies are to provide a particular service outcome to a technical or business consumer. Thanks to the Common Services Data Model, The operational context of the ServiceNow CMDB expands to address elements managed in development planning and service management context and processes. Furthermore, the ServiceNow CMDB also contains information on the people and groups that support, own and manage the different technology stacks, along with the people who consume the CIs in the provided services. And the CMDB includes information about the business, applications and services that ultimately run your business. Now let's look at the different components of the ServiceNow CMDB that are used to accomplish these objectives with the three pillars of CMDB management, Ingestion, Governance, and Insight. The initial phase ingestion is to automatically obtain an inventory of CIs from data centers, cloud, and operational environments on the network. Ingestion is accomplished by ServiceNow products, including ITOM visibility, specifically the discovery portion service graph connectors that source data from existing third party systems, and integration hub ETL used to build custom integration processes. After the inventory of CIs is loaded, we need to understand the logical context and relationships between the CIs. Service mapping, part of ITOM visibility is typically used to implement a top down map or create a tag based map, often seen in private or public clouds. Service graph connectors can also be used to ingest relationship details from some third party sources too. To deal with all this data coming into the single store. The identification and reconciliation engine executes rules that ensure data quality. These rules prevent duplication of CI records, reconcile data from different sources, and ensure that all the desired relationships are established. When you're using multiple data sources enabling multi-source CMDB and using CMDB 360 in the CMDB workspace helps you understand the raw data, analyze the gaps and differences, and set up rules to select the data source that provides the most reliable detail. Once the ingestion is completed, the next pillar is governance. To ensure the data is accurate, complete and in good health. You can define automated policies in the CMDB for managing and populating data, including undiscovered data like who's in charge of supporting the server and automated policies to certify its validity and correctness. Governance is about automating policy to ensure data is complete, so it's moved automatically through its lifecycle from retire to archived to deleted. The insight pillar is the final key functionality of the CMDB; To make it as easy as possible for users and CMDB administrators to get value from the data and to support all the products that depend on the data. It's all here in the CMDB workspace. Value can mean helping you understand the dependencies of items in the CMDB by interacting with a unified map or a CMDB query. It could mean using the intelligent search, which leverages generative AI to get answers based on your data in the CMDB. Or it could mean providing guidance to ensure that your data is healthy and you're using all the best practice processes and tools to maintain your CMDB. The ServiceNow CMDB is an essential tool for gaining full visibility into your infrastructure and services. To learn more, see our product documentation or knowledge base, or ask a question in the ServiceNow community.