Problem
Many organizations face data quality issues in their CMDB, where servers appear as isolated or “orphaned” records. These unlinked servers make it difficult to:
- Identify ownership and accountability.
- Assess service impact or change risk.
- Understand how technical assets contribute to business services.
According to the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), every server should relate to a Service Instance and have defined responsibility groups and users. This blueprint ensures these relationships are properly established as part of the Crawl-phase maturity, preventing orphaned or unmanaged infrastructure data.
What the Blueprint Includes
The model contains the following entities:
- Server – the root configuration item, representing a physical or virtual server in operation.
- User (Owned by) – identifies the person who owns the server [optional].
- User (Managed by) – identifies the person responsible for the server’s maintenance [required].
- Group (Support group) – defines the group responsible for supporting the server [required].
- Group (Managed by group) – defines the group accountable for managing the server [required].
- Service Instance – represents the service that the server runs or supports [required, via one of two alternative relationships].
Considerations
- Review and update group assignments (Managed by / Support group) to match your operational model.
- Ensure all user references are active and valid.
- Validate that servers are linked to at least one Service Instance (through CI relationship or Service Association).
- Adjust the Server class filter to include or exclude server types (Windows, Linux, Unix, ESX, etc.).
- You can extend this model by adding downstream relationships (e.g., storage, network devices) to better reflect your infrastructure topology.
- The provided Field Setup includes example data quality checks for selected attributes.
Benefits
- Eliminates orphaned servers and improves visibility into managed infrastructure.
- Strengthens accountability by ensuring every server has clear ownership and support groups.
- Enables change, incident, and monitoring processes to identify responsible teams instantly.
- Builds a foundation for service-aware CMDB and prepares for CSDM Walk-phase modeling.
- Provides measurable, actionable data quality indicators aligned with DCM’s 5 Step Model for Better Data Quality.
Related Information
Check other templates related to the Service Delivery.
And especially the Server template for the Walk phase.
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How to Get This Blueprint?
If you’re already a Data Content Manager Customer, you can download the Blueprint from the Knowledge Base. You will need your login credentials to access the blueprint download page.
