ITOM Visibility & CMDB Health Restoration

Eliminating Blind Spots with Automated Discovery & Service Mapping
Role: ServiceNow ITOM Specialist

An organization was relying on manual audits to track their infrastructure. As a result, the CMDB was 40% inaccurate, leading to "failed changes" because engineers didn't know which servers were connected to which applications. During outages, the "Mean Time to Identify" (MTTI) was hours because no one had a clear map of the infrastructure dependencies.

WHAT WE DECIDED UPON:

Implement ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping to create a single, reliable source of truth for all IT assets and map the relationships between hardware and critical business services.

ACTION:

1. Discovery Implementation: Configured MID Servers across three global data centers to perform horizontal discovery of Linux, Windows, and Network devices.

2. IRE (Identification & Reconciliation Engine): Established strict Reconciliation Rules to prevent duplicate records from multiple data sources (e.g., SCCM and Discovery).

3. Service Mapping: Used Top-Down Mapping for the company’s core banking application, identifying entry points and mapping all underlying load balancers, web servers, and databases.

4. Certificate Management: Automated the tracking of SSL Certificates using the Certificate Inventory and Management feature to prevent outages caused by expired certificates.

RESULT :

Visibility: Increased CMDB accuracy from 60% to 98% with automated daily updates.

Impact Analysis: Reduced "Change-related Incidents" by 30% because staff could finally see the "downstream" impact of rebooting a server.

Fast Recovery: Reduced the Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) during outages from 120 minutes to 15 minutes using Dependency Views.