hello everyone and welcome to episode number two of glide chat hosted by glidefast today we'll be having a discussion around configuration management and the importance of the cdb to the foundation of the servicenow platform my name is mark harper i'm a solutions consultant here at glidefast and i've been working in this cdb space for the better part of the last decade with me today i've also got ashley snyder and paul group ashley do you want to introduce yourself hi i'm ashley snyder i'm a senior consultant with glidefast i've been working with the servicenow platform for about five years now touched a lot of different areas in the platform and i'll pass it to you paul thanks ashley so paul group i'm our director so there's this consulting here at gladfest i've got about nine years of experience on the platform on all different aspects i was also a former uh service on customer before coming over to glen fest all right fantastic so thanks for joining us here today and i'm sure people have come with all kinds of different experience levels when it comes to the cmdb i'm sure people probably had their hands burnt a few times in the past it could be a little bit of a tinted word but i wanted to just have a quick open discussion about what your guy's experience has been with customers and their relations to the cmdb would they consider it a trusted vehicle or is it just usually an afterthought when they come to implementing itsm so i can go like i've worked for a couple of different customers in higher education and health care and we actually didn't use discovery i feel like you know kind of getting discovery in those sectors there's different laws like hipaa and verba and things like that you have to kind of you know be aware of we didn't really use discovery so we were doing a lot of you know integration setup maybe even manual loading you know and when you do that there is that that operational work and that development work that has to happen that kind of discovery does a little bit for you which was nice that's kind of been my experience yeah and i had kind of the same experience from the customer standpoint for some reason whatever you know whatever it may be there wasn't a lot of value seen and having cmtv so we actually didn't have any we didn't have anything in there so we actually my first customer we kind of just flew blinds and then kind of getting into the the partner ecosystem and understanding you know how important the cdb is it's really made you kind of eye-opening from you know when i look at what i did in the past for the customer one aspect of why didn't we have one you know how do we really run our business and understand things so and i think mark you know with your kind of expertise that you're you know multiple years of focusing and discovering it can you talk to us a little bit about you know how they've changed over the years what have you seen in that life cycle of the discovery seemed to be kind of areas where is it you know where was it where does it come in service now yeah i mean it has changed a good bit over the years and people's mindsets and approach to cndb is is matured a great deal as well historically it's been looked at as a an inventory tool you just load in a spreadsheet and hey we've got a cmdb you can associate the incident or change to it but obviously the problem with that is you load that in on day one by day 30 it's still an erroneous and it's not likely to be in a trusted state so leveraging any form of automation is going to be the best possible way to populate the cmdb and there's no better automation than discovery itself servicenow discovery is obviously built to populate the servicenow class model so you can guarantee that that data is going to fall into the appropriate places that you might not have that same guarantee with an integration point but in terms of like how we've actually progressed the products and over the better part of the last five years we do have more options available to us now than just relying purely on discovery and when we have conversations with our customers uh we try to take it in a much more federated approach to populating the cmdb so that's understanding where we've got different data sources and sources of truth that's going to address a use case and the huge benefit that we have um as of the last six months is the release of what we call service graph connectors these service graph connectors are pre-built and approved by servicenow and they're gonna essentially take a payload from whatever third-party endpoint and a lot of the common it tools are already supported and it's going to process that payload through the identification reconciliation engine to make sure it goes into the right table inside the cmdb and this allows you to marry up various different sources to all work harmoniously together so we've come a long way in in recent years to not just rely on one tool set but having a federated approach of trusted data so customers if you uh haven't heard of service graph connected before they're all available on the servicenow store you can go out and make sure that the third-party product you care about is available for you to to enable on your system would you say the customers that you've had conversations with recently have even aware of the capability of a service graph connector yeah i know i've had quite a few you know recently that they may not know what it is coming into the conversation but they're starting to really see the value of the service connectors and really it's really helping that servicenow has more and more that's really out-of-box integration it's more plug-and-play um getting those up to date and kind of rolling and then being able to have that trust at cmdb you know which kind of you know comes to a big question a lot of customers kind of have is how do i know i can trust that student you know what what has been your aspects of understanding and helping the customer understand like how can they know it's trusted yeah i mean it definitely poses a challenge and there's a few different techniques that's available to us and one thing is trying to identify where gaps in data may exist and it's difficult to report on a non-human entity but if you can again approach him from that like federated population method if you tying in from various different sources you can plug the gaps in your cmdb that may have existed previously so there's a few reports that i like to do with with customers a couple of examples could be if you do a api call to vcenter for instance you can get all of the virtual machines that's hosted on that are managed by that vcenter instance you can then pair that up against what kind of server records you've got in your cmdb and identify any gaps that might be coming through from either discovery or your sccm into an integration and you can marry that up together so once you've got an idea of what's potentially missing you can then start evaluating the actual quality of data in the cmdb and since the helsinki release of the servicenow platform we actually have a few out-of-the-box tools that assist us with that assessment of the health of the cvp and i'll just take a quick moment and i can share my screen i just want to quickly overview what that health dashboard would look like inside an environment so as i mentioned this has been available since the helsinki release but it still seems to me that more than half of the customers that i have conversation with and not aware of its capabilities and it's relatively straightforward in terms of what it's actually presenting but it's a tremendous value when you want to actually assess how much should you be trusting your cmdb so just going up a quick glance of what this actually includes is it provides an overall scorecard for the health of your cmdb and it's made up of three different widgets that feed into that scorecard so we have the completeness compliance and the correctness of our data the completeness as the name suggests it's how complete is the certain ci's in classes that i care about inside the cdb so you might have a recommended field to say that all server records have to have a technical owner this is going to do a scheduled job that runs on a a daily basis to assess to see how well you actually populate in that data that you truly care about on the compliance side this is where we can ensure that there's certain rules that's been defined so you might say that all production servers should have a relationship to a application service so that you can tie it back to what it's been used for to deliver value to the business you could use this for effective chargeback or for assignment rules and approval and then the final widget that we see here is what i consider to be the most important because this is really what customers are looking at and your customers are looking at in terms of do i trust the data that's been presented to me so this is doing an analysis job to try and identify any duplicate data that might be out there that you can then do some form of remediation on as of the madrid release i believe there's a deduplication wizard that allows you to identify a parent ci and binds various different other tasks that may be part of the duplicate to the parent ci we have a orphan status where we're looking to make sure that there's appropriate relationships between two different ci's and then one of the most important ones is flagging and identifying stale records in the cmdb if we're not refreshing that data on a like a reoccurrence then there's no real indication to say that we should trust the accuracy of that data so we can control what this stainless metric looks like and flag any data that's come through that hasn't been refreshed in say 14 days and you may want to go and identify why your source of truth is not updating that record so it's quite easy to configure this dashboard by default these health dashboard jobs are turned off so you can come in you can enable these jobs and then review what your results look like and don't be afraid that if your results aren't all that great if it's not a high score that's something that you're going to track as a kpi as you start to make continual service improvement on your cmdb what do you typically kind of tell customers to focus on first you know save this dashboard popped up and you saw a lot of red you know where's the return on value that they should really focus on yeah so the ones that i'll be focusing uh immediately on recommended fields because we again at the end of the day we're always trying to address use cases and we're not just trying to build a massive data lake we want to work with our consumers of the cmdb to understand what they care about and then making sure that we're populating those fields to address that use cases effectively so an example that i have quite commonly is talking to a security operations team they often have their own spreadsheet or an access database of their own inventory of the various different devices that security has to interact with we want to try and retire those kinds of silos products or siloed spreadsheets and get them to leverage the cdb effectively so having a conversation with them to understand what their use cases are extend in the class model to address those use cases and it could be as simple as just saying a like a true false flag on a server to say if it's pci compliant or not they store that in a spreadsheet we want to store on the cmdb that pci flag we'll put as a recommended field and then we can track how complete we actually are on that data in terms of being populated so i'll be focusing on the recommended first and then the staleness of that data as well we don't want to be reflecting poor out of their data so if it's not being refreshed we're not likely to trust it mark i wanted to comment on the orphan ci so the last customer i actually worked for we would create reports for orphaned ci's and orphaned relationships so every ci class that we onboarded we actually had to put in a script include and run a report off of it and using this capability i feel like it would have just made it so much easier and there'd be so much less overhead so like i agree with the jobs just turn them on and start looking at this and seeing what you can get away from if you're doing stuff like that yeah no that's i mean that's a good point that's it's taken out a lot of that leg work that you would have had to do from like an analysis perspective by yourself and i remember doing these kind of in a sense assessments in a much more manual fashion or scripting out certain things certain activities to output it but when it's all right here and it's just a matter of enabling the jobs there really isn't much of a reason to not say put this in play and just see what it's working with and then from there tailoring it to suit your needs you go into the ci class manager and you can manipulate which fields you actually consider to be recommended so it may not be a one size fits all with the out of the box configuration but as soon as you start to understand how these rules operate you can start tailoring the video needs can i mention one more thing so i'm you know i'm all about workspaces and whatnot right now actually if you set this up this seemed to be health dashboards as far as the how you view ci's in the workspace it actually will click into this dashboard so you can kind of see the health of your ci right in the workspace itself and then click into this dashboard for a more full view right from the workspace so they've tied that together for you out of the box if you're looking for to use that kind of interface as well yeah i mean it i think they had the original idea of build it and they will come and unfortunately very few people actually did come so they're trying to push it from the center now to to get customers to enable this because i mean the reason we're having this conversation is cdb still poses a massive challenge for a lot of organizations but it is that foundation of the servicenow platform so we want to try and make sure that we're maintaining a healthy cmdb and tools such as this and some of the tools that tie into this like that deduplication wizard is what can help you take some strides forward so i know one of the early questions that was put forward was in regards to other changes that's been going on in terms of population methods to populating rcmdb and one very recent update that you may not have seen or customers might not have seen is the capability now of using a an installed agent on the endpoint to report back to the mid server to collect the data so we have this concept called an agent client collector we originally released it for monitoring purposes and collecting metrics and in q3 last year but in the tail end of april we actually released it for the visibility sku as well so not only can discovery operate in an agentless fashion using a service account but we can actually install an agent on that endpoint now so that's particularly useful taking a scenario i know as a common pinpoint for a lot of customers is in the like development environments sometimes a virtual machine is only up for a couple of days and then shut back down or just left in an orphan state and they don't join the domain so it's very difficult for us to capture that into the cmdb but baking that agent into the base image it's going to report back as soon as it comes online so then you have that full asset lifecycle from provisioning to retirement all there is an audit trail inside your cmdb i think that brings up a good point too mark that we saw a lot you know take off last year we had a lot of customers that you know we turned into a very remote organization across the across the world with the pandemic that happened and a lot of you know organizations didn't have laptops that were already assigned to you know individuals so they ran into the situation where they had to rapidly you know assign out machines so people could take them home and work still but how do they keep track of those machines so being able to discover them even when they're not on the network constantly it was a very big value for them uh especially because you know discovery when it runs you've got to be connected to the network discover it whereas the agent will kind of help you know in that scenario and keep track of where all their assets are and make sure that some lifestyle continues even with everyone out at the office so that's a great feature that you know yeah i mean asset management was certainly significantly impacted by the major like modern operational transition that we went through a lot of organizations went through in the last year all of a sudden we had organizations having a shift to this remote working environment and it was more like an emergency procedure to get these devices and assets issued out to individuals there's definitely gaps that's out there still with organizations in terms of asset management but using the scene to be effectively you can then have that agent could be installed or still approach it from like an agent-less fashion or tying into sccm we can start to understand who those assets are being assigned to so as soon as they call the help desk open the case we can use that user record to understand all of the assets that's been assigned to that individual to try and get the right knowledge the right information to your operator's hands and also the history of that device if it's been a reoccurring issue that's been coming through time and time again then it may be time to retire that device rather than spending the additional money on maintenance and hours that goes into supporting that individual with that device so configuration management and asset management go hand in hand and we want to make sure that we're supporting all the operations through that life cycle you're reminding me of my help desk days with the reoccurring issues if i would have had that it might help those days that would have been amazing i mean it's really there you got this call coming through from customer xyz you've got his profile you've got all the assets assigned to him you can even see what kind of software that you subscribe to so just everything the more information that we have in the shop like the short of the duration that we have to have to handle that call and that's that's that's the dreamline right there and then even taking a little step further maybe trying to be much more proactive where that call doesn't even need to occur so i know there's all kinds of different maturity paths that you can take on the on the platform on my side slightly selfishly one of my favorite aspects is event management event management i mean that's dealing with the health of your services and trying to restore the health of that services before the end users actually recognize any form of impact and that's a great use case there for tying it into the cmdb being able to take the raw monitoring data coming through from the various different monitoring tools aligning it to the cmdb to try and do some form of rationalization understanding the impact of that event and being able to prioritize that event effectively and then if you take a little bit further with it some more maturity we can start tying in some automation for automated remediation so before any ticket gets assigned or instant gets assigned to an operator the system is already picked up that this has experiences some form of issue it's passed out what the actual challenge may be it may have seen something similar to it in the past and it's kicked off a integration hub flaw to go and perform some phenomenal remediation and this remediation may only buy you an extra 30 minutes that's 30 minutes of your service desk not getting calls coming through that this service is being temperamental and gives you time for your l2l3 operators to do their due diligence and i think that's a good point to at the proactive piece you know not not even just considering your internal id and your internal organization but also start to talk about customer service and your your actual customers for your organization and how customer service management can really tie into your i.t service management and make that connection so when an event happens you have your it teams going after it but you can also privately alert your customers to prevent them from having to call and sit on hold and be impactful to them so i think that really all ties together and giving that kind of larger picture of where service i was really taking the platform yeah absolutely it's acting as that trigger and trigger on the floor and those cmdb is going to be that hub that's going to spin off those different process areas so you can automatically create a a case that's going to proactively notify the customer you can have the incident that's going to go to sign to the appropriate group and then you also have the visibility to potentially what the change was that happened previous to that incident because we have found that 80 of unplanned outages are caused by unplanned changes so having all that information right there all in one workplace is that's what drives customer satisfaction all right any of the final comments before we uh wrap up this session now this is this has been like a really great overview of some of the new features in quebec but also you know some things that you can do in your cmdb that would have a really high return investment right now yeah absolutely and if you have any other further questions don't hesitate to reach out but yeah that's all we have time for today and thank you very much for communicating [Music] you