[Music] hi in this session uh we're going to have scott lem here our one of our our key product managers for the csdm kind of walk me through how we use assignment group support group managed by managed by group and how that applies to the cstm model so thanks for uh spending some time with me uh scott i really appreciate it i'd like to ask some questions about this because i think there's a lot of folks that are a little bit confused about what do i use when when do i use assignment group or why isn't assignment group on on everything or why isn't support group on and everything so i'd like to get your perspective on this and we we can maybe walk through a couple scenarios using cstm here sounds good all right so i'd like you to kind of explain sort of the difference between assignment group and support group and i've got the csdm up here as the background i think the first thing i want to focus understand is maybe from a ci perspective all the different types of cis that are in here what are the groups that they should set here and then what are the ones that they are setting for what kind of use case like incident management versus change for example so in this space really the the infrastructure cis are what we're talking about in this space where the the pieces and parts that make up an application service and this type of data we really call them the manual metadata you can't discover you can't discover who's the support group who's the assignment group as you mentioned or the match by group so these pieces have to be managed and thought of separately but we also have to have consistency of how they're being used so let's start with support group support group the use and purpose of support group is really around incident so who is the group that i need to route this incident to based off of the ci that's been chosen so it's a host or it's a database who am i going to route this to to take care of the issue the incidents that have come in that really is the support group and we want to make sure that's focused on on incident use the other one that we have and this one's a bit confusing historically it's been called assignment group on aci but when you're in task regardless of the type of task being done it is always labeled assignment group so a lot of folks get confused as to what am i supposed to use in various places when on a ci i have a attribute labeled assignment group but then anywhere in task i have who i assign it to is the assignment group so when and where should i use the assignment group one of the things we did in the recent release of servicenow is we modified the label of this particular attribute so that we're more descriptive of how we feel it should be used so assignment group is really meant for change what is the group that's going to be working this particular change in change management and that's the attribute we want to focus on now for some customers the value that we use the group that's going to be routed for change or for incident is the same so some customers have actually chosen to only populate assignment group and you use it for both incident and change which is fine except moving forward we need to be very specific in our attributes and assignment group which is now labeled change group really should be used for change and support group really should be used for incident even if it's the same value in each customers can work at synchronizing those when they're the same but we need to make sure that consistently across the board each of those attributes are used for those particular functions okay so so i guess we have a historically assignment group versus support group support group going forward is really intended for that incident process right assignment group which is traditionally in there a little bit confusing with support group maybe sometimes the same but we're really the the label change has made it more clear that this is more for a change management not it's necessarily incident management is that correct correct okay okay now for customers that may be using it for incident management we're not dictating and saying stop now change everything you know let's do a gradual modification into these pieces but ultimately moving forward we want these to be unique got it yeah it makes a lot of sense because you know there's the folks that process the incidents versus the folks that will prove a change and they're going to have folks in the business that are in the design that will be involved in a change for example but not necessarily for incidents when you know customers are calling in right it also helps from a consistency standpoint for servicenow products we need to be able to go to an attribute consistently to know this is what i want to use all the time every time as opposed to sometimes i go here and sometimes i go there so we really need to be more prescriptive with these attributes and how we want them to be used in the long term got it got it so two more things i wanted to cover one is the new uh manage by group and then just the manage by so we have um i'll call it m by group and then we have the old managed buy so uh you want to explain those two for for us so i like that you said that old manage buy because historically that's all we had and manage buy points to an individual user as opposed to a group and for many organizations we don't want to have an individual have that type of responsibility and it's been used for different scenarios i've seen it used where this is the person that takes care of our vip executives from a a end user computing perspective i've seen it used to identify the individual person who oversees the data on that particular ci so we haven't had consistent use of what that object should be across the board so what we heard from customers is that we don't like that it points to a user we want it to point to a group because individuals could go on vacation we don't want to have to rely on a single person what if that person moves to a different role all the scenarios you get at when one single name is attached to a ci so listening to that and also realizing that a lot of customers were creating their own custom managed by group on their own we installed into the environment our own out-of-the-box object of manageby group which is on all ci's by the way it's not special to any one particular ci and we identify this group as being the ones that are responsible for for that ci that the data that's related to that ci and making sure that that that ci and everything about it is accurate and we actually have a lot of use cases moving forward where we want to use the manage by group to identify whenever we have a question about a ci whether it's about its its status and its overall life cycle or we want to attest that ci to say hey is this is this still being used is this active is the data on this accurate is this okay to to end of life or is this okay to to deprecate this and archive this particular ci or even delete this particular ci so we want to make sure that magiby group really has the responsibility of that ci and the data on that ci so we see that as a very important object we've also made it simpler to manage that particular object so that customers can go to the class manager and actually identify a default managed by group within each class so if we want to say for for all of the network switches this is the match by group for these particular cis or the windows servers and so on you can actually within class manager identify who is the default manager by group for those particular objects and that becomes important because as we started talking this is manual metadata you're not going to be able to discover the the group that's responsible for sci when a ci is discovered and created so to be able to populate a default managed byte group by class becomes extremely important okay so basically if i have like servers at the base level but if i break that down i might have windows type servers versus linux type servers underneath that i can have a different group on windows versus on the linux servers correct okay that just becomes a default yeah yeah and any any ci that's created basically will get that managed by group is that right correct okay excellent and and those groups are basically these kind of groups the ones we are referring to in foundation is that correct correct and that's another reason why that foundation domain becomes so important because we have a lot of referential data that we're going to be depending on okay okay so i and and so that that's an automatic propagation a new ci shows up right underneath the server windows server the group is going to be assigned and now i know who's who's responsible for it is that correct correct you just have to have your cmdb manager go into class manager and identify what are those groups that will be default on each of the classes that are yeah but that's like a setup once that's once that's set up then i set it and forget it and from then on it'll all get populated properly right correct now there are some classes we don't allow a default managed by groupon one of them is service offering whether it be a technical service offering or a business service offering and the reason for that is another capability that we have starting in quebec is synchronization so that we can get much granular much more granular with these particular values so if there is a technical service offering and it's responsible for taking care of one segment of those windows servers maybe it's at a particular site and that particular technical service offering the data around it it's support group it's change group and then in the scenario the match by group is different than the default then we will populate and synchronize the values coming off for that technical service offering onto the dynamic ci group and cis that are part of that particular technical service offering so it allows you to get much more granular you've got the default for a whole class but if you've got it broken up by the various teams that are responsible for taking care of it we can get more granular using that technical service offering in synchronizing that data okay okay so let's say i have two data centers right i'll just kind of draw another box out here so this is data center one with stuff in it i have another data center out here in another region and i might have a different uh group that manages that infrastructure down here so i would have a different offering in that case and i could apply the a different group to this offering right is that the case correct and then have a different uh dynamic ci group that queries that data center so it's all part of one cmdb but based on the query criteria i could say this one points to stuff in one data center and this one points to stuff in a different data center correct excellent in the next area not only are we synchronizing the manage by group we're also able to synchronize the support group and the change group that we talked about earlier okay so so basically the same sort of process works for the support group assigned at the offering level so sgs and change group correct and the value there of course is you can't discover this type of manual metadata and trying to manage that manual metadata on thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of cis can be quite foreboding so if we can instead manage that on the technical service offerings which represent the teams responsible for providing and maintaining those technologies then we're able to more effectively management on a smaller subset and then just synchronize the data where appropriate so for example if i have a virtual environment and i'm creating all kinds of new virtual machines dynamically because of this dynamic group association it'll pick up the new stuff right and then the and then the groups will be assigned appropriately automatically as well correct excellent and if those objects in that dynamic ci group move so now they're no longer part of that dynamic ci group then it'll go back to the default that was put on the class manager so really a lot of effort that's been put on here to make sure that that's the right data on the right ci at the right time so basically the ci is the first here so it does the ci level i would say assignment first and then uh so that's the first priority but then the second one comes in and overrides that from the service offering correct all right all right so that's good so so you so if you're if you're seeing where you set it at the ci level and then you're seeing different ones come in that that might be because you have a dynamic stack group and it could be part of this sort of chain where it's getting assigned down this route correct okay all right um no that's good that's good and i think that's the majority of it now i know a lot of folks are are probably looking at this and saying you know when you talk about manage by group we have different products that seem to have their own management capabilities like an app apm there's ownership up here which is a little different maybe there's already a service owner that might be over here a little different what's what's happening there are we going to be consolidating that or even going over to more of a teams model that's a great question and so today you know out of box we've got multiple attributes that'll reference the various contact and we've talked about the support group and the change group the managed by group there's also the approval group which is needed during change so based off of whatever infrastructure is having a change what portion of the business is impacted off of the service offerings business service offerings and business services so if if it meets certain rules then are those folks notified or part of the approval process of a change so we have a lot of attributes that exist already out of box but we were finding that customers had the need for more and as much as dozens of custom attributes were being added by customers to represent what are appropriate and effective teams that are responsible in different manners for a particular application or or it's its overall stack and so instead of adding more and more attributes and trying to guess at every possible scenario of the contacts that could be involved with a particular ci on the actual ci we want to move towards more of a team's approach which will capture the various folks that are responsible for for that particular ci and their various roles and capture that inside of a related list so not trying to add dozens of attributes to a particular ci but instead using a related list that allows customers then to identify what are the various teams and their roles that are responsible for working with this particular ci so we're looking at a business application you mentioned earlier you know the owner of that business application you also have the technical team that were responsible for for designing or creating that particular application from a support standpoint the level one two and three is responsible but you also have folks that that might be involved from a role perspective that deal with security or that deal with the data management if you've got critical or or sensitive data associated to a business application so it allows us to identify what are all of the folks that are responsible or involved with this particular ci in this in this case a business application so that you know who are all of the pieces to come together to participate with this overall application yeah so so basically all these owners right all these owners that you see out here will be eventually kind of part of a team is that right right if you look at all these owners right there's quite a few of them that we have right here but that's the goal is that once we understand what they're working on they're all sort of on that team working on the same thing is that right and then we've got consistency so now we have a place to go to on the platform related to usci to identify all of the team members and their roles that are involved with that particular ci excellent well it's been very helpful i think it's kind of straightened out a number of things for me and the customers have been asking about and it gives us a little bit of an insight on where we're going around teams and how that kind of comes together maybe simplifies this so we don't have so many individual groups to be able to have to manage and some confusion about which mat which group do i use when and why and where well thank you very much scott i don't have any other questions at this point i think this is good to get out to our followers and hopefully it helps glad to help all right thank you