Sunday, Sep 05, 2010
Login

Posts Tagged ‘Configuration management’

Promote a Field from an Extended Table in Service-now

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.
S
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…


Walking the Service-now.com CMDB Relationship Tree

O

ne 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.


 

Recent Comments

  • Scott Stechmesser: Awesome script to use. Works great. How would you modify it to be able to copy a Catalog UI Policy?
  • Tulio: Perfect!!! Thanks for this.
  • Ron Methias: Another reason why I have stopped going to the official SN documentation sites and make the GURU my...
  • Richard Huss: Ingenious – and somewhat simpler than the way the Incident Resolution best practice plugin does...
  • valor: Joe, that’s one of the reasons why I’m parsing out the URL instead of trying to get the page...