Managing CI relationships in ServiceNow can be a struggle, and maintaining the relationships manually can be downright tedious. Furthermore, mistakes can come at a price. For example, ServiceNow Discovery relies on these relationships, and if duplicate CI relationships exist, updating a record can fail.
If you’re a capable ServiceNow developer or have one at your disposal, you can write scripts to query duplicate relationships. However, this is unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming and probably requires elevated user rights.
See some discussion on the topic in the ServiceNow Community
- Duplicate CI(s) relationships in CMDB – CMDB, Service Graph, Data Foundations
- GlideAggregate for detecting duplicate records – Developer Community
Find Duplicates Without Scripts
I’ll show you how to quickly find duplicate CI relationships using Data Content Manager with no scripting. Then, you can use the same method to monitor CI relationships’ integrity continuously and spot those duplicate CI relationships as they appear – before they cause problems.
Data Content Manager can solve all kinds of data quality issues on the platform. This one is just a straightforward but effective use case. If you’re unfamiliar with DCM, check out this 1½ minute intro video.
Here’s how to find duplicate CI records in just a few minutes with visual tools, no scripts, and no admin rights.
Draw a Blueprint with Duplicate Checking Enabled
Here is a simple blueprint that begins from the CI Relationships table (the one in the middle, marked with “R”). The Blueprint also includes CI references for Parent and Child Configuration Items.
Run an Audit and find CI Relationship Problems
When you run an audit with DCM against the simple Blueprint that we just created, these are the things you can expect to find:
- If any of the CI Relationships are missing a Parent or a Child reference (Yes, this happens surprisingly often)
- If any duplicate CI relationships exist
Running the audit once will give you the baseline and understanding of the current situation. Running the audit on a scheduled basis will help you identify and remedy these issues when they occur.
Audit Results and Built-In Reports
Once the audit is complete, you can immediately see the results without creating extra reports.
For a single audit run, you can see:
- Duplicate CI relationships
- CI relationships that exist without a Parent CI
- CI relationships that exist without a Child CI
Built-in reports in DCM will show issues identified by the audit and their impact on your overall data compliance.
Example report showing “Duplicate Records per Class”
Example report showing “Missing links” for CI Relationships
When you add this new Blueprint to your weekly data audit schedule, you begin to see trends and the impact on your overall data quality in ServiceNow.
Easy Set-Up, Quick results
It is better to find these and other data quality issues as they occur instead of when they cause problems with Discovery or any other platform functionality that depend on the integrity of these relationships.
Drawing a simple blueprint like the one shown here only takes a few minutes with Data Content Manager. You can set the audit up to run on a schedule, so you will be able to catch duplicate CI relationships when they occur – along with any other deviations from your data models.
Try it Out
If you want to try this, you can run this audit in your own (non-production) instance with a free Data Content Manager Trial. We’ll give you the template and help you set it up. Setting up the Trial, the template, and running the audit will only take about an hour, and you will get tangible results!
If you’re already a DCM user, just let us know if you want to try this, and we’ll send you the template.
Talk to Us!
Book a meeting with us and we will show you what we described here, along with many other things that will help you improve the quality of your data in ServiceNow.
