in this video we're going to talk about cross fuses cmdb turn key now the cmdb turn key is really divided up into three sections of uh fixes enhancements and new functionality and we're going to talk about all those in turn so the very first thing we're going to talk about are some fixes and the very first thing we're going to talk about I don't know you may decide it's not a a fix per se uh but it's it's really a streamlining if if anything else and that is cleaning up all of the modules over on the left hand side so the application navigator is notorious in the configuration application for just having a bunch of modules in fact out of box there's something like 148 uh or so modules we deactivate quite a few of those and so we only show about 31 modules and the reason for this is because there's no need to show all of the CI types right off the bat you really should be reactivating those modules as you decide that you're using them and so we deactivate them so it's easier to look at again it's a it's a you may take a exception with the fact that we're calling this a fix the fact is it's uh it streamlines things makes it easier to parse and uh drives adoption really for cmdb in general now the next thing we're going to talk about is business services and business services occupy the very topmost part of your cmdb structure and they are logically defined instead of being discovered or configured uh as you know physical boxes or network switches or something like that instead Business Services really represent what you do for the business and as a result they're going to be human modifiable but out of box they're a little too human modifiable and so one of the fixes that we have is we come in and we make it so that only users that have the C ecmdb admin role or members of the support group or show up in the owned by field and if they have the iil role only those people can actually delete or modify Business Services out of box if you just need the iil roll and you can delete whatever you want but if it's such a mission critical part of your business it's important to secure and that's what we do we also have some ACLS in place around list editing to make sure that not just anybody can change class names or uh the you know other other attributes that are mission critical such as operational status all right let's go ahead and talk about some enhancements that we've made to the system itself some some best practices that we've baked in to uh cmdb uh in itself the first is that we actually activate three plugins as part of our TurnKey we ac activate the service portfolio plugin the task outage plugin and the data certification plugin these are all uh important and are not necessarily on in all instances and so we turn them on as part of our turn key now let's talk about a little bit about uh the form layout for business services by default or rather let's let's go into the uh service offering rather Now by default in the service offerings uh table there are four fields that reference both the user and the group field so two that reference the group uh the user table and two that reference the group table um they are owned by approval group support group and managed by and now if you're if you're coming into the system for the first time it might be a little confusing as to what you're supposed to use those fields for and so what we've done is we've actually stripped it down to just two support group and owned by we find that this is usually sufficient for most organizations and uh just hiding the approval group and the owned by um or sorry approval group and managed by Fields um we eliminate a lot of data Integrity problems and so uh it it makes it easier to fill this in and and it seems to be the right amount of data for most organizations we also uh have created a small piece of functionality whereby you can come into service offerings and change the parent field so I'm going to go ahead and change this instead of voice communication which makes sense to uh Blackberry which doesn't make sense now when I do this watch what happens to the related items field right here or the sections so I'm to go ahead and hit save and what it'll do is it will actually update the related item section to uh represent the fact that we've made Blackberry it's parent so instead of having to go into the plus and add a CI relationship you know the really confusing and hairy way instead you can just modify the parent field and this will hook you into the correct part of the cmdb now this is this this is not something that we do for servers or anything like that this is purely an enhancement that we have made to the service offering Business Service section of the system because I just this is how most people want to manage that logical part of the uh cmdb they don't want to get down into the plus and accidentally choose consumed by instead of used by instead you just modify the parent field and it goes ahead and updates the uh related item section to match following along that same uh track that same thought process of enhancements one of the uh things that we really believe in is taking the existing functionality that service now gives us and making it better hooking it in in more places Etc so you remember one of the plugins we turned on was the task outage plugin well we're using that in combination with good cmdb data to improve the incident management process so when I create a new incident and I def I indicate what configuration item is affected if I select a configuration item that has an active outage open against it then I'm going to see an alert on my incident record that says there's an active outage so this is something that's part of our cmdb turn key and um the interactions with the outage in general is something that our TN key uh makes better so first first off you can come into this incident field or this incident form here and you can click on the sort of no entry sign here and see all of the active outages affecting this CI you can also you know do other things uh to see the active tasks against this configuration item um we've modified this just slightly to show only activ tasks service now may have plugged that since we built this but the point is we're using the cmdb to reach out across the the itsm processes we're using it as a central point uh to then gain insight into what else is going on in the system uh based on other you know tasks that also are uh around this CI so that's how we interact with outages you know we we we pop them up if you select a CI that already has an outage against it if you uh if you want to you can also use the rightclick and uh choose create an outage I don't see it right now because I need to save this incident but one of the things that we enhance as part of our uh TurnKey is we only allow you to create One Outage sorry uh well One Outage against a single configuration item sorry you can't uh say something is out twice for different reasons it's either out or it's on it's it's in or whatever terminology you want to use uh we also have some business rules to help with this we've got a business rule to to prevent duplicate outages against a single C and we've got a business rule to prevent um updates to closed outages again just to make sure that we're being really clean and how we're interacting with outages so these are these are some enhancements that we offer as part of our TurnKey really you know we're we're turning on the task outage plugin and we're tying into the task outage plugin um in the incident uh process especially um but we're also uh you know making the task outage creation process a little cleaner uh through those various enhancements now let's go ahead and talk about some of the new functionality that we've got in the cmdb that takes the form of three main pieces of functionality CI actions CI groups and CI duplicates the first I want to show you are CI actions one of the things that we really believe in at Cross viws is service Centric categorization we don't really believe in using category subcategory fields to uh to categorize our incidents and that's because categories and subcategories really only exist uh table by table right so the category subcategory on task or on on incidents probably are not the same category subcategory on changes Etc so if you want crossplatform reporting category and subcategory aren't really going to help you the other thing is that category and subcategory are divorced from The Incident Management process at least when you're usually prompted to fill them in so you know you picture you're filling in an incident record and the very first thing you're asked to do is decide whether or not this is a hardware software or network uh category incident well let's say that someone calls in and says I can't get access to my email hm is that Hardware might be maybe there's a server down is it software maybe maybe their Outlook is messed up is it Network maybe maybe they're having network connectivity problems the point is I don't know at the point at at the at the juncture of actually creating the incident what I do know is I know the CI specifically the business service that's fritzing out and so that's really the definition of an incident isn't it right it's an interruption to a business service or uh you a degradation to a business service so because of that I should be equipped to identify the business service that I'm experiencing an interruption or degradation with and that's in fact exactly what we've got here by enshrining configuration item instead of category uh we're we're basically putting that process into play however people like subcategory fields and so we've added a a concept called CI actions really they are you know actions or symptoms depending on how you want to model it it's just additional information about the configuration item that you've selected so I'm going to click the magnifying glass on action symptom and you'll notice that we've got a couple of things here we've got service not responsive need ldap account reset cannot log into service cannot retrieve email so some of these are General and some of these are laser focused on just this configuration item to show you what I mean I'm going to select a different configuration item such as one user phone system and then I'm going to click the action SLS symptom field again when I do I only get the general ones now service nonresponsive and cannot log into service so what this means is I can have actions and symptoms that are General across many different types of configuration items or very specific that only show up for a specific configuration item the general way that we suggest organizations go about using this is to create a set of 5 to 10 CI actions or symptoms that you care about that can be applied to all business services or service offerings and launch with that then over time go to your business service service offering owners and say do you need to track any additional data points and they say if they say yes then you can start adding more specific things so let's show how those CI actions are created go ahead and leave that incident and these are all of my CI actions that I have defined within the system itself I'm going to start on this top one system non-responsive and you can see that I am pointing it at all CIS of class business service so I could change this to BCI class of network adapter or server or something like that if I wanted to open open up that CI field and have it be pointed at more than just business services and service offerings the other thing that you can do is you can point um CI actions at specific configuration items so in this case need elap account reset is pointed specifically at the email business service and the sap app server uh server CI now if you've got both of them filled in if you got CI class and configuration item filled in the system treats it as an or so if either one is met then uh it will show that particular CI action now the second piece of new functionality are CI duplicates CI duplicates is a uh uh basically it's set up to allow you to monitor duplicates and prevent their creation uh before they can do any harm so let's go into one of the these uh CI duplicate rules this is how you use this new piece of functionality first things first you have to create a CI duplicate rule um and I've got one in place already here that says we're listening to the hardware Table and there is a unique field called serial number and optionally a secondary field called name if these two are the same then we are going to flag it and not allow the system to actually insert a a uh a new CI so I'm going to go into uh let's go cmdb CI hardware and let's test this out so I'm going to go to uh something that has a serial number so let's go into this computer right here make sure that it has a serial number it does and it's got a name and I am going to attempt to do an insert and stay this is sort of a lazy way of doing this but picture this being done through Discovery or through a data import anytime that the system tries to create a new record this thing is listening so I'm going to do an insert and stay and it's going to say configuration item with the same serial number already exists in the system so click here to manage the duplicate records so this goes back to the CI duplicate table remember we've created a CI duplicate rule once we trip that rule it's going to create a CI duplicate record so I can click here to manage the duplicate records duplicate record or I can go to the CI duplicates and see all of my pending CI duplicates from here I can go into the CI duplicate record and I can allow the inserts so simply allow the duplication to take place I can delete the CI meaning get rid of it alt together or I can merge to existing CI and in that case it's going to take the record insertion attempt it's going to take all these other data pieces and it's going to attempt to merge them into merge the differences into uh the existing record in the system so once I've done that uh and and I've basically taken all the Deltas between those two records and merge them together I no longer have a CI duplicate and I can be on my Merry way now service now introduced a piece of functionality like this very s very similar to this and I believe it was Helsinki and now this functionality is is basically it it it's purported to be a CI duplication uh prevention but what it is according to my understanding is it is an API uh it's a script include that you call to say are these two things duplicates or is this thing a duplicate so you have to be proactive and that you have to ask the system is this going to be a duplicate as opposed to this piece of functionality which I've just shown you which once you've set up your duplicate rules will run no matter what whenever you go to create a new record in the system no matter what what the source is now the very first uh the very last piece of functionality we're going to talk about are CI groups and let's go ahead and go into configuration and go to groups and this right here is a way to uh it it it allows you to interact with CIS at a group level so the classic example that we give is something like a patch Tuesday where you've got 200 different servers 200 different Windows servers that you want to create a change request against and you want to make sure that you're tracking each one of the servers as part of that change request but my goodness at what cost right it's uh it's going to take forever to mark all of those servers so what you can do is come in and Define a new CI group in this case what I've done is I've created this ahead of time given it a name of Windows servers I pointed it at the table Windows server and I've said that status is installed this is important because this is a dynamic filter this is as opposed to a static related list if you select that you'll just get a related list at the bottom where you can Define whatever CIS you want to group it doesn't matter um this is a dynamic filter meaning that at runtime when we try and figure out what belongs in this group it's going to use this filter to uh to build that so with that in mind let's go ahead and go into our change request system and I'll show you what this looks like I'm going to create a new routine change just to Mak this uh just to expedite this and for the configuration item I'm going to go ahead and choose Windows servers and I'm going to then hit save when I do the system will note that I've put put in a group and it's going to go out and find all of the windows servers that match that filter in this case there's eight and it's going to add them to the affected CIS related list so I've got the original group plus the eight CIS right here that fit the bill and just like that you can interact with it now what's cool about this is that functionality exists that listener exists on this cmdb C Fe so that's on the task table and you could conceivably use this in Incident Management problem management Etc but I just showed it to you in change request because this really is where it shines in my humble opinion so again uh you can come in and create new uh new groups of records and those groups of CIS uh if you put the group in the configuration item field here it will add the related CIS to the affected CIS related list on the task record itself and that takes us to the end of the three new pieces of functionality in cmdb again at CI action CI group and CI duplicates so to wrap up what do we've got we've got first off we are cleaning up all the modules second we are making the security a little tighter uh not allowing just anybody delete to delete things and locking down list editor edting we're turning on three plugins service portfolio task adage and data certification we are simplifying the form layout for service offerings we are making sure that you can use the parent field on service offerings to drive the CI relationships functionality we are really enshrining a service Centric cmdb especially as showcased in The Incident Management System we are drawing in the outages process where we are showing active outages on the incident form and we're only allowing you to create One Outage against a particular CI etc etc we have also created three new pieces of functionality CI actions CI groups and CI duplicates