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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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