CMDB health
Quick answer
Measure completeness, compliance and correctness, and turn the dashboard into a remediation plan.
Key takeaways
- Health has three dimensions, completeness alone is misleading
- Remediation belongs to the data owner
- Prioritise CI classes used for impact and service mapping
- Trend beats absolute score for reporting
Three dimensions
Completeness measures required attributes that are populated. Compliance measures adherence to your CI class model and required relationships. Correctness measures staleness and duplication. A CMDB with 90 percent completeness and no relationships is still not usable for impact analysis.
From score to action
Health results create remediation tasks. Assign them to the team that owns the data source rather than to the CMDB manager, otherwise one person spends their life fixing other teams data.
Targets that work
Do not chase 100 percent.
- Set targets per CI class, servers and applications matter more than monitors
- Focus on the classes used by change impact and service mapping
- Track trend rather than absolute score, direction is the useful signal
- Review the required attribute list, some are noise for your estate
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Check your understanding
Which dimension covers duplicate and stale CIs?
- A. Completeness
- B. Compliance
- C. Correctness
- D. Coverage
Show answer
C. Correctness
Correctness measures duplicates and records that stopped updating.
Who should own a remediation task?
- A. The CMDB manager
- B. The owner of the data source
- C. The service desk
- D. The change manager
Show answer
B. The owner of the data source
Fixes need to happen at the source, otherwise the problem returns.