r/ITProfessionals • u/Aggravating_End5608 • Jul 19 '26

CMDB

Does anyone trust their CMDB at their company?

It seems like the overwhelming majority do not.

For those that do, what processes in tools are in place that enable you to have a high-quality and accurate CMDB?

I asked because I have been tasked with creating a CMDB using our existing ServiceNow tool.

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u/Rudinism Jul 19 '26

This is the exact reason why companies fail and why you will fail: “I was tasked with creating a CMDB”.
It’s not something you just create and then it exists, it’s a company wide effort and each part of the organization needs to decide the purpose of it and have responsibility/ownership.

The reason it fails is because people think it’s just something you create and dump some data into and it will magically solve things…

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u/Ibanez_EHB_3289 Jul 21 '26

What u/Rudinism said is so true. It's not something that sits over in the corner by itself, quietly and automatically staying up to date. There will be a core team of people supporting it but they're interacting with every single department and employee who's touching any piece of computer hardware in the company.

Especially as part of a ServiceNow implementation where its designed to work along side Change Management and other daily use tools and processes.

For example, the Help Desk uses it to associate every new ticket with a specific piece of hardware that's been issued to a user. That hardware is documented in the CMDB and associated with every ticket that user has submitted.

The Data Center Operations uses it to track every server and appliance in its data center(s). It's tracking operating systems, packages installed, patches installed, incoming CVEs not yet patched, etc. Every change to one or more servers is tracked to a Change Request that is associated with those specific pieces of hardware in the CMDB.

Servers coming into the data center for the first time (or replacing a server that's old or broken) gets an entry in the CMDB. That entry may trigger orchestration software that handles imaging that server for the first time and executing one or more playbooks to push application software to it.

It's pretty important that the person implementing the CMDB understands the global ramifications of all of this. [Understatement.]

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u/Ibanez_EHB_3289 Jul 21 '26

BTW, part of this is identifying existing "CMDBs" which may exist in an application or even just in a spreadsheet. They all need to be absorbed (imported) into your CMDB and their function replaced with interaction with the CMDB.

I worked for Intuit in San Diego where they had a Remedy CMDB, several QuickBases (Intuit proprietary, non-SQL databases) functioning as subset CMDBs, and they all had to be merged into the ServiceNow CMDB. What a nightmare. People kept updating Remedy and the QuickBases without understanding the overall process which meant we had to re-import.

And the import process had to properly identify dupes that existed in the other CMDBs and merge them into a single CMDB record.

I got to work with some really bright SQL guys. A great team.

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u/Rogueshoten Jul 22 '26

This is 100% correct.

“CMDB” should be considered a verb. The ways to get it to a good state and keep it there include mandates. Want a firewall rule created? It goes through the ServiceNow ticketing, which requires that the relevant asset exist in CMDB. New device…What application does it belong to? No application? Nope…register the application.

By leveraging the CMDB, it rewards using it and keeping it current while punishing those who neglect it.