TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2012

Posts Tagged ‘CMDB’

Track Affected CIs in One Place

Friday, 27 May, 2011 06:47 Written by Mark Stanger
5 Comments

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t should come as no surprise to you that, if used properly, your CMDB can be an extremely valuable input to your incident/problem/change processes. This is true not only of the actual CIs, but also the ‘Affected CI’ records that you create. ServiceNow gives you a couple of different places to track this information. The first is the ‘Configuration Item’ field available to all Task types in the system. You can add this field by personalizing the form for any task. The second is the ‘Affected CIs’ (task_ci) many-to-many table. This can be added to any task form in your system by personalizing the related lists for that form.

This setup allows you to track a primary CI or Business Service against a given task in the field on the form, and it also allows you to track multiple Affected CIs against a task if necessary in the related list. What I don’t like about this setup is that these are managed independently so there’s not a single place to see ALL of the Affected CIs in your environment. My solution to this problem has always been to centralize all of this information into the ‘Affected CIs’ related list by copying the ‘Configuration Item’ field value into it. This simple idea gives you a much better look into your Affected CIs for reporting, and allows for more proactive troubleshooting through CI Business Service Maps as an input into your task processes.

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Expand/Collapse All Separator Modules at Once

Tuesday, 17 May, 2011 07:37 Written by Mark Stanger
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few weeks ago I helped a co-worker with a requirement they had to allow users to easily collapse and expand all of the module separator sections under the ‘Configuration’ application in ServiceNow. The ‘Configuration’ application is loaded with modules for all of the CMDB classes in the system. While this may be useful for admins, it can also be a lot to look at all at once under the application. Of course, you can expand and collapse the module sections to more easily display these modules but there are also about 12 of those to do! What the client wanted was to be able to click once and expand or collapse all of the module separators at once.

While this solution probably isn’t for everybody, it might save somebody some work down the road so I’ll post it here :) .

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Creating an Alias for Reference Field Searches

Monday, 03 May, 2010 07:26 Written by Mark Stanger
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A while ago I wrote about some of the different ways to customize the autocomplete search behavior for a reference field. I saw a forum post the other day where the poster asked if it was possible to create aliases for records so that they could be searched on. For example, what if you had a CI called ‘ABC’ but everybody knew it by the name of ‘XYZ’? While support for this type of searching isn’t really built into Service-now, it is possible to add this kind of behavior to a reference field. If the CI just had a single alias, you could probably just customize the display value and do a ‘contains’ autocomplete search as described in the article previously. For this specific scenario I think that there might be a better way to accomplish the same thing.

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Viewing CI Subscription Notifications

Tuesday, 26 January, 2010 07:36 Written by Mark Stanger
1 Comment

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he Subscription-based Notification plugin allows Service-now users to manage their subscriptions for any notification in the system. It also allows users to subscribe to particular Configuration Items in your CMDB that they may be interested in.
As an administrator or process owner, it may be necessary for you to be able to view or report on which users have subscribed to updates for a particular configuration item. You may also want to see what configuration items a particular user has subscribed to without opening up their subscriptions page.

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Promote a Field from an Extended Table in Service-now

Tuesday, 19 January, 2010 06:13 Written by Mark Stanger
12 Comments
This customization DOES NOT come across in update sets! If you make this change you need to make it across all of your instances manually as soon as you verify the result in a dev or test instance.

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ervice-now allows you to use and create extended tables to help organize your database structure.  Out-of-box, there are 2 really important places that you’ll need to understand this setup.  The first is the ‘task’ table (which includes incident, problem, change_request, etc.) and the second is the ‘cmdb_ci’ table (which contains every table in the Service-now CMDB).
One of the nice things about this type of arrangement is that it allows you to set up fields or columns on these tables that can be unique to a single table (‘caller_id’ on the Incident table) or available to all extensions of a parent table (‘short_description’ on the Task table).  You can see if a table extends or is extended by another table by using the table schema map.

If you’re not careful when working with tables that are set up this way, you can get yourself into a little bit of trouble.  Fortunately it’s not that difficult to work your way out of it most of the time.  The biggest thing to be aware of when you’re creating fields on an extended table is to know what table you’re working on and what table(s) your new field should be available to.

If you do make a mistake, the easiest thing to do is just to catch it early and re-create the field.  If that’s not possible then there is a command you can run that promotes a field from an extended table to a parent table.  The function should be run from ‘System Definition -> Scripts – Background’ and works like this…

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Walking the Service-now.com CMDB Relationship Tree

Wednesday, 06 January, 2010 13:08 Written by Mark Stanger
10 Comments

One of the great features of Service-now.com is its CMDB and relational mapping.  You can easily set up relationships between any CIs in the system.  Once the relationships are defined, it becomes very simple to pull up a visual representation of a CI and its dependencies by using Service-now BSM maps.  Using this feature allows an end user to look at that CI and identify what else in the environment is impacted by an outage or a change to that CI.

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Latest Comments

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