[Music] all right thanks Callan for joining me on this cmdb health overview this is going to be a good session to talk about how we improve our customers CMD health I'm Mark bodman senior product manager here at servicenow I'm calling yeah and I'm a senior program manager here at servicenow yeah Mark great great to be with you here today and like you said we have some great content we're going to be talking a little bit just about CNB Health at a general high level and then really we have a couple of great demos to show today on ways that you can see how your cmdb is doing and how that Health impacts the value you get out of your servicenow instance so we're going to look at two different ways that you can get some insight into your CNB Health the first is the cmdb and csdm data foundations dashboards and I'll be running through those today and then Mark is going to talk about the cmdb health dashboard as well yeah and a lot of people know about the health they seem to be Health dashboards but they not know about the one you're going to be covering their calendar right I mean the data foundations dashboard because that's downloadable in store yeah yeah it's relatively new we've got a a version two that just dropped a month or so back in August of uh 2022 here and yeah there's tons of uh great Insight you can get into that so we're going to talk about both today great let's get into it so yeah first of all I want to kind of talk about the three pillars of Excellence for the cmdb and I call it cmdb plus because we're tackling more than CI records in a lot of cases and we'll be expanding this ingestion as we create more service graph connectors but the three pillars are ingesting information from existing sources of data that you have about your environment your the second pillar is all about the Insight that data gives you and those are operational processes but also planning processes and during reports and metrics and be able to use our products that use those that data in some interesting ways you know for operational purposes planning and everything in between the last port is really the most important part is really the governance and health of that data to support the both of those sites you need to be able to govern the ingestion information to provide the folks that need the information to make decisions and to run our products on the platform and so governance and health is all about ensuring there's healthy data there there and that you have a life cycle process all right so we're talking about cmdb health today and there's a lot to it there's a lot of different metrics and you know there's some effort involved in making sure your CNB is healthy and so why is that important uh you know you don't want to do it just to have a nice bar graph that says you're at X percent and we have done a lot of analysis on cmdb health scores and other results that our customers get correlating their health score to other uh metrics and we can see here some key ones uh customers who have a healthy cmdb resolve high priority incidence faster they've got fewer high priority incidents and they fulfill requests faster and we can see some other ones here as well changes tend to go faster and more smoothly vulnerabilities are have lower age and certainly lower age on critical ones and we see uh incidents get resolved by problem that sort of great benefits across the board and you might look at this and think it's limited to itsm and the easiest ones that we have to measure are certainly in the itsm space but cmdb health is a is a key across the platform for a number of our products they rely on the cmdb and to get the most value out of those you need a healthy Foundation yeah a couple things to Callum that I thought was interesting is how important this is to like things like integrated risk management um and also planning like I came from the itbm now SPM business unit and this information is critical for planning a change or a data set in migration or or whatever affects your I.T estate yeah absolutely and we'll see even with uh in the data foundations dashboards we start to get into this csdm world a little bit as well there and and to see just how key certain parts of your data that resides it really seem to be is is used and reused across multiple modules and being able to to measure and make sure you're doing that sort of in the way that all of those programs and applications on our platform expect the data to be there it you know it's it's just growing in importance and and being able to make sure that you're you're doing things sort of the right way that the platform expects them to be done yeah yeah and the other thing on this slide I think these metrics are great these are based on our customers is that right we've done an analysis and we kind of compiled these metrics based on our own analysis of our customer base yeah yeah absolutely and these are and when we go into the dashboards later these really are a correlation based on the metrics that are in the data foundation's dashboards and so yeah we run that across our uh you know internally across the our production instances of our customers and you can see with the little asterisk down below it's it's based on 9000 production instances so there's a lot of data crunching to get these correlations uh set and yeah this is uh definitely real world data and and so we were quite interested even in you know internally to see these correlations and just realize how important this health really is yeah so of course we don't publish any of that customer information this is just an aggregation score is that right a hundred percent yeah yeah we don't know any of that it's all just uh pure rolled up numbers yeah I like this slide there Kellen because it does kind of break down how important that shared cstm cmdb data is to each of the vertical business units that we have on the platform these are all of course ITX business units that use the cmdb in some interesting way my favorite is probably irm GRC because in the integrated risk management if you don't have good data you don't know what you're even looking at from a risk application point of view what applications do you have what servers do you have where are the risks and without good quality data you're sort of blind in that risk space but it goes into all the other areas and you can see some are very high and critical um and and some are less critical so it's really A variation of the dependency on the cmdb and and the quality of that data it really makes a difference yeah and and you'll see see when we look at again at the data foundation's dashboards which I you know I'm probably a little bit more familiar with my personally than the health dashboards but the the number of metrics that we have in those you know some of them are very specific and very applicable to these different verticals and so you know think of irm or or item even we look at things like are there how is the location data on uh configuration item CIS and the cmdb and is it you know do we have duplicate locations or are we capturing asset numbers on hardware and things that we know are sort of best practice or things that really are are critical in order for item for example to deliver value you know and it's very uh very very prescriptive which is what I like about it you know you can see sort of in black and white no this is what we're doing and this is what we're not doing and here's how we can how we can get better excellent all right so we've talked a little bit about uh the two the two dashboards this is sort of or the the two different sections I guess uh so we'll talk um in just a little bit more black and white here on the differences between them so they are both very important pieces uh available within servicenow for measuring the healthier of your uh seem to be as Mark mentioned the data foundations dashboards are available in the store they're free anybody can go and get them um and as I mentioned there's a version two which sort of expanded the number of metrics that were in there so I encourage you if you're watching this video and you don't have those uh dashboards yet go and get them just getting them and and having a quick look we've seen many customers get sort of an insight into just low hanging fruit or things that they might not have realized they should be doing and some of the things in there are are actually quite easy to to fix and when you do that you go in and do the fix for the data foundations dashboards they run a job once a day which updates those metrics so you'll see you know you can go and manually rerun the job or or just wait a day and you'll see your scores improve as you make changes uh to specific areas that might not be in the shape they need to be and I just want to say we'll put a link to that dashboard here at this point so you can kind of download it right here yeah great they are very prescriptive meaning uh the the metrics are fixed you can't go in and and change them or uh alter fill put filters on them which is good and bad and for some customers uh they may have a very prescript very legitimate reasons why they do something a little bit different than we say they should and the way we measure it in some of the metrics and you can't sort of get around that with the data Foundation stash board so in some metrics some customers may be showing a poor score where really they you know they need to have it that way for the the uniqueness of their business case yeah so it's our prescribed approach those metrics they can't alter those metrics the way they're calculated um and that's on that's intentional so we have a objective rating in those metrics right and so if we were to go and to you know take a look at a customer X and just to without any other context try and have an idea of how you know what shape their cmdb is in those metrics the ones that uh you would see in the data foundations Dash course that's what we would use internally as a sort of a starting point in the dashboards you also get some widgets and we'll see all this in the demos I won't spend too much time on that same with the playbooks which are fantastic and I'll we'll take a look at those in the demo and uh in terms of who would consume them in your organization um because of the prescriptive nature of those metrics um in general you're gonna see some of your scores potentially be lower and if you were showing them to senior it management or CIO you know in some cases you'd say well this shows that it's a 40 but really because of a b and c it really isn't that kind of becomes a a a bit of a spaghetti conversation and so they're really the metrics are great for folks who are close uh working on the cmdb on a daily sort of operational basis they can consume that understand what they need uh to do to get better Mark for the CMU Health dashboard then yeah so the cmdb health dashboard in contrast uh there's a it's been in the platform for a long long time and there's a lot more configurability to the dashboard where customers can include or exclude certain Ci's for example uh so if they know CIS are not good quality they just exclude them and improve their metrics right then and then and there we focus on what we call currency correctness and completeness of the data but it doesn't go much further beyond that it just is a very basic set of metrics there are some more advanced features like desired States or scripted audits which do require you to have some knowledge of the the structure of the data and design those policies those States uh or basically like policies and apply them and those can be mixed in with the the reports as well and a lot of it seem to be Health dashboards are suitable for your external audience because you can kind of tailor them they're not you know an external point of view they're your internal point of view on what you you characterize this quality the current current complete and correct then you can of course use that as a internal communication methods to your leadership absolutely so let's get into the demo so here are the this is the newest version of the cmdb data foundations uh dashboards this has been downloaded from the store installed in the instance and um close that out and we can see there's four tabs that share or that our metrics are spread across for the cmdb and I'll jump over to the CSD csdm1 after and show that but so we've got best practices customization data management practices and itsm processes and so how these metrics work are basically they're looking for you know air quotes bad things in your cmdb so Hardware CIS with serial numbers is one of the ones that we have here and what this is looking at is a serial number field on Hardware CIS like servers being populated so Discovery other um Discovery tools whether service now Discovery or something else we'll go through somebody's uh it infrastructure and populate the cmdb with Hardware CIS and they should always have serial numbers it's a key field we know it's very important life cycle management and it's looking at ones that are uh up with with an operational status of being active which is essentially operational status of one we talked about prescriptive ones before right Mark where where uh these dashboards you can't go and change things and one thing that some customers have is there they may use a custom status field they might say well for us for whatever reason we don't use operational status of one we use 99. the polarities can't really account for that so there's this is something to be aware of that um how these dashboards are today they are very fixed and that you're sort of using the out of the box um status codes in order to get sort of good numbers here yeah and so if customers aren't familiar with what to do to improve these numbers right what if they aren't good and they're not sure why what do they do yeah yeah great question so uh we've got a remediation Playbook here and so you can see uh so all of these metrics really so before I get into the Playbook all these metrics I'll just quickly say have a result here and the result is always zero to a hundred percent so when we go and run the query we're looking for for bad stuff so in this case we're looking for Hardware CIS that don't have a serial number and in this case we can see down here in this sort of test data instance there's 101 000 Ci's that are missing a serial number so so that gives a result of zero percent or some background math on how that you know how do we take a raw number here and convert it into a result between 0 and 100 and every uh metric has its own way that it does that but you'll get a score between zero and 100 and a priority and not every metric is equal so some of them like serial numbers is actually more important than others so services with owners even if this was a zero percent score you might find that the hardware CIS is rated critical versus services with owners is rated High right and that's sort of the service now recommended you know if you're gonna all things being equal fix this one first yeah yeah and then okay so so the we prioritize them from high from a priority standpoint critical to low yep yeah and then yeah if you want to fix them the playbooks are fantastic now what's the origin of these playbooks because I I know there's a lot of folks out there that kind of know what they're doing and they've done this a long time and and this is their career what what is what is really contained here yeah and it's it's those folks you're talking about so we've got uh product success teams sort of internal teams here at servicenow where they they live and breathe this stuff so they're working with uh you know all swas of customers on a daily basis and they are true experts in implementation and in helping customers work through issues that they have and so that team actually put these playbooks together so we worked with them on refining the metrics and they had really good input into the metrics themselves you know it wasn't only the business unit that the folks who make the product it was with our our folks who are Hands-On with customers and refining how we measure what health is and then those uh those teams they're ones who help Pro uh customers who have real problems with their cmdb and so they capture that knowledge into these playbooks and so these are linked off all of the metrics and you can see the table of contents here and really what they do is they talk about um what is the metric so you know a customer might think why do I care if I don't have serial numbers on a hardware asset or why do I care about an orphaned relationship or you know someone a little more self-evident than others but these playbooks give you a summary of why it's important right so serial numbers are in Asset Management and it helps you know helps you uh in your meantime to resolve because you can identify Ci's faster so on and so forth they have Upstream causes so these are just sort of General reasons why you know you might have a problem with that specific metric so in this case Discovery pattern right there might be a problem with how you've configured Discovery or whatever tool you're using to import your Hardware impacts to that impacts on business I can see these are very in-depth and then there's remediation plays so there's in many of these playbooks there's additional scripts to do some additional analysis there's ones in here there's a link to those fixed script and it'll give you some output and then what to do to uh go and and resolve that so if you determine Discovery is the issue you know option A go through and do this stuff if it's a third party integration they'll do option b so there's a lot of great info in here that really can help you go through and get to resolution on these issues not just be aware of the problem but but help you fix it yeah I like that it gets into so much detail because I mean you could drive down into the level of detail yeah and you even provide an executive summary so if I have to make a case to make the change or to go to the other source other folks to help that have have them help me uh improve these metrics I I have a a case I can make you know with my executive my leadership absolutely you know and our internal teams can reference these and and partners can references so you know if you're a customer and and you put in the dashboards and realize okay we've got some issues here but your teams don't have the bandwidth or the technical expertise to go through and actually fix this stuff these are still a great starting point where you can go and then yeah age expert services or partner to help you resolve your issues yeah and we keep those up to date as we learn our new product features come out yeah absolutely yeah the team goes in and has updated and like we say in August we just added a bunch of new ones so there were new uh ones created just within the last couple of months awesome yeah so the other thing that the dashboards have are these performance analytics widgets so we can see and there's uh for Hardware CIS missing serial numbers we've talked about this one here's some more uh detail on that so you can see it's Windows servers the different types of servers and this test data they're all kind of the same here but in your instance uh your instance you might see oh you know Windows servers are the problem you know everything else we're getting serial numbers populated so you can dig into into these actually see the individual records that are missing serial numbers and uh go from there so this is all kind of test data which is why it's not um and why it's fairly uh even number of 8K records but you can click show records in the upper right here and this is probably on a slower instance also not too bad and you can actually see everything well look all these serial numbers are missing so you can drill in and uh you know this really helps in doing your troubleshooting so this is all built into these uh dashboards which are which are free excellent and so I'll just quickly flip to the other tab so customization is looking like are you um using standard naming do you have too many custom tables or Fields uh starts to look at some relationship types as well well that one's an interesting one too because I hear a lot of customers that are trying to get quote unquote back to out of the box condition they've customized their stuff so much yeah they don't even know what out of the box is so this kind of helps them in that Journey right yeah absolutely you know some customers have have customized uh stuff in the past which we didn't have out of the box so they were you know you know uh had a very legitimate reason to to maybe make some new tables or or look at how their relationships are fields and uh now though we we have some things out of the box and and so they should really start to look at migrating to that and and in other cases there's customers who just didn't realize that it was it was already there out of the box and they went ahead and made their own stuff which is you know at the time there's typically somebody's got a reason for doing all that extra work but it does kind of can potentially hurt you a little bit down the line well yeah because we've expanded our use of the data are are basically normalization of that of the data has has improved over the years so yeah new products that expect the certain data to be in a certain place yeah that's it exactly yeah data management practices things like having your uh CIS come in via the uh identification reconciliation engine so these are things that we have in place where you know if you're bringing in data use the ire it it will do some checks on the ire and help de-duplicate things and make sure your data is good coming in and you can bring in data not through the ire which would be you know when I talk about the bad things so in this particular test instance they are really not bringing in their data for the ire so that would be something that they would want to look at and it's priority High here saying and customers can learn about the ire and some of the database cmdb features when they take the cmdb course yeah absolutely you know that all that stuff that the courses you take the foundation courses and and things in that as you're learning that you'll see that show up in in uh metrics here because it's it's important and we want to measure it yeah uh lastly is itsm processes so you know when we showed the health uh the really cool benefits the correlation metrics we get a lot of those were itsm related and so yeah you can have the best uh seem to be in the world but if you're not using Ci's on incidents and changes uh you're really not getting a lot of benefit out of it so we we measure that here and just want to make sure that you are in fact using uh using your cmdb data on on stuff that you know service knowledge is helping deliver value for in this case keeping your systems up and running so yeah I I'd meet a lot of customers have defined services but they don't connect any of them to their CIS kind of like with this particular data suggests so they don't ever get to the point where there's a real root cause something actually in the data center in which is causing their problem in their data center or in the cloud data center it doesn't really matter because yeah it's working both yeah yeah so this helps highlight that so last thing I'm gonna you know I feel like we're going a little long on time so I'm going to blow through csdm here but csdm so it's a separate dashboard when you download from the store you get both together so it's cmdb and csdm and so in csdm we have these five Foundation crawl walk run fly tabs same thing uh different metrics they've got playbooks they do the results the same way zero is bad 100 is good and they've got the PA metrics down below yeah and I noticed that the crawl walk run fly is really uh aligned to our implementation csdm implementation methodology yeah Scott lamb who's uh you know sort of one uh you know Mark you as well but there are a few folks who are really key in developing and growing managing csdm here at servicenow and they were uh you know Scott really owned this part of the data foundation's dashboards as well so he helped craft this and he made sure this was you know 100 aligned with everything else that we've been publishing and teaching of ocsdm foreign a lot of these tabs there's fear metrics but um it just really helps and get you along your csdm journey where you can just see some of these um different tables and a lot of what we checked for here are just our tables are these sort of very specific cstm tables populated and are they referencing and having proper relations with other csdm tables and so some of them uh you know it's sort of a two-way check do we have application services with business service offerings and we have business service offerings with application Services things like that so as you get in and start to improve this you know or start to use these tables and make sure the relationships are the right way these metrics sort of intend and won't go up quickly together excellent and now we have to fly yeah yeah all the way up to fly yeah or you're just you know you're at the Pinnacle of your journey and oh this is we got some of the best test data in here where it's really changing but yeah yeah so that's it that's really it for the data foundation's dashboards and uh so hopefully uh yeah you know my biggest uh my biggest uh takeaway I hope you get is if you don't have them go out and get them and take a look and and really start uh start with the easy lower hanging fruit and go from there yeah really are just sort of a different Counterpoint to what we see with uh the cmdb health dashboard it's uh I'd say that's safe to say is that fair mark yeah absolutely so to get to the cmdb dashboards you just type in cmdb dashboard in your Navigator and what you'll see is the three different views here and that's where we can go and look at the the metrics based on everything in the cmdb the certified by service or by group and these are special groups they're called Health groups that you can create that basically provide metrics first groups of CIS that you want to single out but let's go into the cmdb view here first and what you're able to see here on the health cache cord is the completeness compliance and correctness of the data as the difference between this and the and the new data foundations dashboards is that this is somewhat configurable and you can kind of Define what these metrics really mean and you can of course slice and dice this data so you can make these metrics look really good because you're excluding things that you know are bad within the calculations here like I think of this Mark as this is a view just sort of an internal you know a view of what you think is important it's a smaller subset than what we look at with the with the other dashboard yes it's more just sort of what we care about whereas the dashboards is a little bit more of a view of what every cmdb should have and it's it's certainly a broader set of metrics I think that's right and it's not as specific you know this is a pretty pretty broad uh number here and what it means can be highly defined and tweaked by every customer so what compliance means is really based on some elaborate rules you would set up on current state or analysis so you look at the state of the data and then that of course would come basically look at the changing the data that you you get from the score so uh so these are the the three different scores that we have and you can look at specific CIS yeah so you kind of Target let's say just the cluster node for example and see the quality of those specific Ci's and you can see a score looks very different but now we're only looking at a small subset of the data based on that CI alone not all of the different Ci's in the system so it's a little bit different of course and a couple big differences we don't track this data over time there's no trending analysis at all it's just a static view of the score does not use PA or the out of the box dashboards so that's something to consider if you want to see trends of course that that's not really here we also have the relationship help information and so this get looks at your relationships overall and if you have duplicate relationships orphan relationships that don't have one of what are the other connection on either side so they're just kind of sitting out there without a CI connected and stale relationships uh things that haven't been updated in a while based on Discovery or other data sources that you're expecting to feed into that data so so this is how you can kind of look at the specific data down here and um and the last thing I want to kind of cover here in the in this view is that you've got the jobs that are running by default when you install the CNB these are not running so you're going to go and enable them but there's a number of different jobs that basically provide these calculations and drive that data into the dashboards themselves is there a way mark from this dashboard like the what's the best way if you wanted to and I think you you might just be showing it right now if you wanted to to zoom in on the offenders that are dragging a certain score down yeah so that's kind of where you get into some of the um details down below here if you look at completeness compliance and correctness uh the the specific CIS that are contributing to the score are are selectable so here you can see the top 10 incident generators this is just something we configured out of the box uh top 10 change generators and when you look at the CI computer that's the CI that's contributing the most uh if you click on this it'll give you the list of Ci's directly and you can see that the metric is is basically filtered out so you can slice and dice this data even further if you need to to say okay you know these these are things that I need to look at uh maybe this is a specific model that's causing your problem so you can further divide that and Conquer and fix this data as you need to yeah that's great and sort of nice to see that similar functionality that we've got in the data Foundation dashboards as well you know the overall scores are great but you you really do need that detail to try and uh remediate the issues that's right yeah and and of course it doesn't tell you how to fix them or you know what I think I like about the data foundations dashboard you got the Playbook so here you're just seeing there's bad data it's bad you don't know why you don't know what to do about them there's not a lot of guidance built into this right it's uh you know why why are we getting orphan relationships why is it stale you know so yeah and the other thing I just wanted to kind of show you some of the differences in the views this is the service view here and what this does it basically provides you a service hierarchy approach to the data and you can see everything looks peachy King but you don't necessarily have all the CIS all the in what I would say the infrastructure and physical elements of the of the portfolio kind of called out here so everything at this level there's just a much narrower set this is all pretty much logically correct created and not necessarily something that you would see you know Discovery problems for example again so this is a bit higher and the the last thing the last view that you have that I mentioned is this group View and this group view is where you can create very specific Health groups and I haven't created one but let's uh we can do that real quick just to show you how to do so there's no data here currently what you can do is when you go to create a cmdb group so come in here and I got a bunch of groups that I already have but let's say I want to focus in on just one CI class or maybe a subset within my group I can create a new group and when I go through this process I give it a name uh my group and I am able to say the health group so if you don't change this it will never show up on that dashboard so there's the the regular groups which are the hall cmdb workspace groups that are there for the workspace processes that'll show up in the workspace that we now have out there uh and then they're Health groups so I'm going to create a health group here and submit that and that's going to create a new group and that's the one I just created here and we'll go in and Define what CIS I want in there and the way these groups work is this only works on encoded queries so you'll have to be very specific on what that condition is thank you all right so I'm just going to do a really basic Ally so you can see these are the Ci's that you want to put in that query so you can do a number of ands or conditions in here to kind of group things together how you like but I'm going to go after the just the regular server you can search that by by the name or the table name so you can see I got to the right one here and there's some classes here but here's you can put to create the classes and additional filter conditions submit that and of course this is the group that is going to populate and so um now that I created that you'll we can see all of the different Ci's in that group so if I want to just validate validate the query is right before I go and look at the health scores uh so a little bit of a detour here on the on setting up a group a lot of people may or may not know how to do this but now you're looking at you know 89 CIS that that's the right expectation but I also would suggest is you could filter out the operational if you need to but this by default won't so that's another difference I think the out of the data foundations Health dashboards does look at the operational status and only looks at operational as this one by default that may not be the case you don't have to look at just the operational status you can include everything so you got to be careful about that so now that my my group is created what I'm going to do is go back to the help dashboards and look at group View and you're not going to see anything initially um because we haven't run the the results against the group so this is where you have to go to the health dashboard jobs and run the job in order to see the results so so for in this case I'd have to go in if I wanted a new completeness score go ahead and do that and execute that now and that will update my scores so I'm not going to wait around for that to execute but in the background the the group will then stop there we go that's that was really quick so we already got a scores for the completeness but uh that's kind of how it works those jobs happen at night you are able to calculate the scores and see them through various means through the service through the CIS directly at a very class level or by groups which combine classes or filter out things as you need to that's awesome I do like that ability to apply filters and zero in a little bit more on what you need so great to have this in the tool belt as well as the the broader data foundations dashboards which are definitely a little more uh rigid and prescriptive in what they're looking at yeah and and I know in the future we've already got on our our roadmap in the future we're going to be combining these in some way and bringing them into the workspace but you know we'll save that one for for later when that's a little bit closer to delivery yeah looking forward to that but uh yeah it's still still a little ways off I think this is all we have to show today and uh if you have any further questions you can go ahead and comment on this video or go to the community you'll see a link to the community site and yeah we can ask answer questions there and and certainly we'll have a link also in the description for downloading the data foundations dashboard and uh that's pretty easy to do too uh if you haven't been to the store if you just go to the store on the servicenow and just do a search on data foundations you'll be able to find it pretty quickly yeah foundations is kind of a not commonly used word amongst different stuff that we have at servicenow so same Mark when you showed the jobs for the cmdb health dashboard that's similar for the data foundations dashboards they have their jobs that run and when these dashboards get installed the jobs run at midnight if you wanted to kick off that job and have it run and populate right away after you install it just go to schedule jobs and search for foundations and you'll see those those jobs pop up in the list as well so hopefully this is helpful for the folks that are out there that are looking to improve your your cmdb data quality we see this as a critical aspect for all the products that you use on their platform and data data is lifeblood that's the i in I.T I like to say so without information you can't do your job nice yeah I have to remember that one thanks yeah thanks Mark