Foundational Data Concepts for ServiceNow

0:00Hi, Sean here, and welcome to this skill

0:02where we're gonna be taking a look

0:03at a few foundational concepts

0:06that will really help you understand setting up

0:09and working with CMDBs and ServiceNow on a deeper level.

0:13Now, the first question here,

0:14which may seem rather obvious,

0:16but you'd be surprised how many people

0:18have difficulty answering this question,

0:20is what exactly is a CMDB in the first place

0:25and what purpose does it serve?

0:27Now, in my typical fashion,

0:29I like to kind of reverse this question here

0:31and ask what purpose does it serve first.

0:34So let's jump over to my whiteboard here,

0:36and I'm gonna start off here with a situation, right?

0:40So this may sound familiar to you, it may not,

0:42but either way, I think it should help illustrate

0:45why CMDBs are so important.

0:47Let's imagine that in your organization,

0:50it's 2 a.m. and something bad happens, right?

0:55Now, there's plenty of things that could go wrong,

0:56but in this particular case,

0:58let's say that the customer-facing checkout page

1:01goes down, right?

1:03Maybe the customer tries to check out

1:05and it just sits there and spins forever,

1:06and this is a major problem, of course,

1:08because while this is happening,

1:11the company's not making money, right?

1:12Customers aren't checking out,

1:14customers aren't buying things, it's really bad.

1:17And so in this situation, what'll typically happen

1:19is the on-call engineer will be summoned, so to speak,

1:24and what they're gonna do is they're gonna try

1:27to figure out what's actually broken, right?

1:31So in this case, it probably wouldn't take very long

1:33to figure out that maybe the checkout service is failing,

1:37but this could be for any number of reasons.

1:41Now, here's the major problem.

1:43We happen to know, looking at this

1:46from the sort of omniscient storyteller perspective,

1:50that there are many things that could be causing this,

1:53right, the checkout service might be failing

1:55because of the database, right?

1:58Let's just draw that over here, sort of a sloppy database,

2:00but you get the idea.

2:02Maybe the checkout service is failing

2:04because of the payment gateway integration,

2:07something's wrong with that.

2:09Maybe the checkout service is failing

2:11because of a server that got patched earlier that night,

2:15or maybe the checkout service is failing

2:17because of a network change

2:19that someone made the day before, right?

2:22Now, again, going back to the main problem here,

2:26this engineer, right, our engineer that we've summoned,

2:29is more than willing to check out all of these things

2:31and see which one's the problem,

2:33but at this point, they don't actually know

2:37what things the checkout service depends on, right?

2:41They don't know that the checkout service

2:42has anything to do with this database

2:44or this payment gateway integration

2:46or this server or this network change,

2:48and that is the main problem that a CMDB,

2:53when properly used and maintained, will help us avoid.

2:58Right, so in other words, the main problem here

3:01is that our on-call engineer is gonna spend

3:05probably the first, let's say, 40 minutes

3:08just trying to map out what the checkout service

3:11actually depends on before they can even start

3:14diagnosing the real problem, right?

3:16So they're not able to check out the database

3:19or the payment gateway integration

3:22or the server or the network

3:23because they don't know that the checkout service

3:25depends on those, right?

3:27That information, if you're in an organization

3:30that unfortunately is like most,

3:32lives in many different places, right?

3:35Maybe some team over here has a spreadsheet

3:39that they maintain that has that information.

3:42Maybe, you know, fast asleep halfway across the world

3:45is the engineer that set this up,

3:47and that engineer remembers setting all of this up

3:50and remembers what the checkout service depends on,

3:52but that, at this point,

3:54is just what we call tribal knowledge, right?

3:56In other words, it's knowledge that's locked away

3:58in this person's head.

4:00And, you know, maybe somewhere else,

4:03maybe on Slack, let's say,

4:05there's a series of messages between people

4:07from the last time that something like this happened.

4:10Now, unfortunately, that conversation doesn't include

4:13our long-suffering on-call engineer over here,

4:16and so it's not really useful.

4:18So, again, all of the idea here of a CMDB

4:22is to get all of that stuff out of spreadsheets

4:26and people's heads and Slack conversations

4:28and into a place where any employee

4:32who needs that information, in this case,

4:35you know, our on-call engineer,

4:37can access it and quickly figure out

4:40how everything in our organization is connected.

4:44So that is the idea of a CMDB.

0:00All right, so as I said, now that we are familiar

0:02with the type of situation that CMDBs help avoid,

0:06or rather help facilitate the solution to perhaps,

0:10let's talk about how a CMDB actually works, right?

0:14How does it achieve this, you know,

0:17rather idealistic sounding task

0:20of getting things out of people's heads,

0:22out of Slack conversations, out of Excel spreadsheets,

0:25and into a centralized place where the right people,

0:29in this case, again, our engineer,

0:31have access to the information that it contains.

0:35Well, here's the basic idea behind a CMDB.

0:39A CMDB is a centralized repository

0:43that stores information about all the IT assets

0:47in an organization.

0:48Now, in ServiceNow, just to show you where this lives,

0:51if you go to the All menu and then search for CMDB, right,

0:54most of the things that have CMDB in the name

0:57have something to do with what we're gonna be looking at

1:01in this course.

1:02So just to give you a basic idea

1:04of how wide ranging the CMDB world is within ServiceNow,

1:10just wanted to show you that.

1:12As I said, a CMDB stores information

1:14about all the IT assets in an organization,

1:17and these are typically referred to as CIs, right?

1:22Yes, there are a million and one acronyms

1:25in the ServiceNow spaces.

1:27I'm sure you're already aware.

1:28And this stands for configuration items.

1:31Now, again, that term configuration item

1:34is just a rather nerdy way of saying

1:36something that IT cares about, right?

1:40So that's the basic idea there.

1:43So the key thing to understand here is that CIs,

1:46right, configuration items,

1:49can be lots of different things, right?

1:51So they can be physical hardware, right?

1:54This can include things like servers,

1:57laptops, routers, switches, right?

2:00This can be software.

2:02So this could be like applications, licenses,

2:05and it is really hard to say all of those things

2:08and come up with them in my head while I'm writing this.

2:11Anyway, they can be applications, licenses, OS versions.

2:15They might be virtual assets, right?

2:17So, you know, this could be VMs, containers,

2:21cloud instances.

2:23They might be services of some sort.

2:25So this could include things like email.

2:28This could be a customer-facing web app.

2:30This could be a payment gateway.

2:32And it can also include a host of other things

2:34like documentation, contracts,

2:37and even people or teams who own something.

2:41That's actually a very important CI, right?

2:45Because it helps us understand if something goes down,

2:47who owns that thing that is causing the problem, right?

2:51And so anyway, that's the idea of a CI.

2:56Now here's the other part of a CMDB

2:58and how it relates to the scenario

3:01that we discussed previously.

3:04The database doesn't just list these items.

3:08It also maps how they connect, right?

3:11So there's a variety of different terms for this,

3:14but for now, we're just gonna call it relationships.

3:17So in addition to the CIs,

3:19it also maps the relationships between those CIs, right?

3:24So the CIs themselves are the things that the IT,

3:27you know, the things that IT cares about.

3:30The relationships are how those things

3:33are related to one another.

3:34And so that might sound rather obvious

3:36from the name relationship,

3:38but this might be something like saying

3:39that the web app depends on,

3:42let's say, these three servers, right?

3:46And maybe it also depends on this database over here,

3:50and maybe it also is load balanced by this device over here,

3:55and maybe it's owned by the payments team, right?

3:59Those are all very important relationships

4:02between things that could all be represented

4:04in a CMDB by a CI, right?

4:07This team that owns the thing is a CI.

4:10These servers are each their own CI.

4:13This load balancer is a CI.

4:16This database is a CI, and the web app itself is a CI.

4:19So by having that map, right?

4:22Let's go back to our other situation.

4:25What would this allow us to do?

4:26This would allow the on-call engineer

4:30to look at the web app and see,

4:32okay, this thing's related to these things.

4:34These things are related to maybe these other things.

4:37Maybe these servers depend on some other database

4:40or some other service.

4:41Those things depend on these other things,

4:44and ultimately, that just makes it much easier

4:47to at least know what parts of the vast IT system

4:53you need to investigate when something goes wrong.

4:56All right, so hopefully that helps you understand

4:58the main sort of subtopics underneath CMDBs,

5:02which again are CIs and relationships,

5:05and how they combine in order to give everyone

5:07in an organization a more accurate picture

5:10of how everything is connected and what all exists.

5:15So the next thing that I'd like to do,

5:17just to kind of close off this discussion

5:18about the basics of CMDBs,

5:21is I wanna go through a few additional situations,

5:25maybe slightly simpler than the first one

5:27that we went through,

5:28and discuss how a CMDB would be a lifesaver

5:33in each of those situations.

5:35So let's start off with the first situation here,

5:37which we'll call impact analysis.

5:39It's not a name that I came up with.

5:41That's a regularly used term, I know.

5:42All right, so let's imagine here

5:44that we have a database admin,

5:48and this database admin has realized

5:51that they need to apply a security patch

5:54to a database server over the weekend, right?

5:58Maybe this server has a known vulnerability

6:01that it's important that they fix.

6:03Well, the problem with this server

6:04is that it's an older server,

6:06and nobody in the organization

6:09is entirely sure what applications

6:12or what other parts of the infrastructure

6:14still use it, right?

6:16There's obviously lots of other apps out there, right?

6:19Other servers out there,

6:21but is there still an active connection

6:24between these things and that server

6:26that needs to be updated or not?

6:28Well, this is kind of a tricky situation

6:30because the database admin

6:32either needs to delay the patch,

6:34which leaves a known vulnerability open longer,

6:38or they have to take the risk, patch it anyway,

6:41and see if anybody calls them at three in the morning

6:44saying that something critical broke, right?

6:47That is not a good situation,

6:48and so here's how a CMDB would help.

6:52In this case, if this organization had a CMDB

6:56that had up-to-date information on all of this stuff,

7:00the up-to-date part is another issue

7:02that we'll talk about in much more detail in this course,

7:05but what the database admin would be able to do

7:08is pull up the server's CI, right?

7:11Remember that pretty much everything in here

7:13is going to have a configuration item that represents it,

7:17but what the database admin will be able to do

7:19is pull that up and look at something

7:21called its relationship map.

7:23Now, what this will enable that database admin to see

7:27is that maybe there are three applications

7:30that still depend on that server,

7:33and maybe two of them are no longer in use,

7:37maybe they're an old internal reporting tool of some sort,

7:41and maybe the third one is something

7:43that's moderately important,

7:45but not as important as the vulnerability

7:48in this database server, right?

7:50Well, in that case, using this information,

7:53the database admin would be able to schedule that patch

7:57and give a heads up to whoever owns that reporting tool,

8:00that's another CI, by the way, and relationship,

8:04that we know who the owner of that is,

8:07that will tell them what's going on

8:10instead of blindsiding them on Monday morning

8:12when they come in and their application doesn't work, right?

8:16So that's the first sort of additional situation.

8:19Let's talk about another one,

8:21which is a slightly different sort of situation.

8:25Let's talk about compliance and auditing, right?

8:29Let's imagine that a company

8:30that handles customer payment data is going through an audit.

8:34Well, what the auditor is going to ask for,

8:37auditors always seem to wear glasses, I don't know why,

8:40but what the auditor is going to ask for

8:42is a list of every system that stores

8:46or processes cardholder data

8:48along with what's protecting each one.

8:51All right, now, in this case, if we don't have a CMDB,

8:55this is gonna be a problem

8:56because the security team would need to go system by system

9:00asking different teams to confirm what's actually running

9:03and how it's configured, and this could take weeks.

9:07All right, now, if we were using a CMDB,

9:09as we'll see a little bit later,

9:11the cool thing about CIs is that, in service now at least,

9:16they're typically tagged by data sensitivity

9:19and compliance scope, and what this would give us

9:22is an accurate list of servers, databases, applications,

9:27whatever it is that's processing this data

9:29in a matter of minutes instead of weeks,

9:33along with which ones have encryption enabled,

9:36hopefully all of them do, who owns them,

9:39maybe this person over here owns them,

9:41this person over here owns this one,

9:43and when they were last reviewed.

9:45So, as you can see, that's gonna make it much easier

9:49to get this information back to the auditor,

9:53in that situation.

9:54All right, and the last situation here that I'll give you

9:56has to do with cost management.

9:59These are just three of many different situations,

10:02by the way, but I think this gives kind of a good sampling

10:06of the various situations that CMDBs can help with.

10:10All right, so in this situation, let's say finance,

10:13our auditor wore glasses,

10:15maybe our finance team wears a tie.

10:17Ha ha ha.

10:19Let's say that finance flags that the cloud bill

10:22has gone way up over the past year, right?

10:26Maybe it's gone up 30% over the past year,

10:28and they want IT to explain why this is.

10:33Well, in this situation, if we don't have a CMDB,

10:38then IT might suspect that some of it's waste, right?

10:41Maybe we have unused VMs,

10:44maybe we have over-provisioned servers,

10:45maybe we have duplicate licenses,

10:48but again, without a CMDB,

10:50there's no easy way to see what's actually being used

10:54versus what's just been sitting there

10:56since some project wrapped up, right?

10:59And so in this case, what we would be able to do

11:02is look through a number of different CIs, right?

11:06Maybe one's a server, one's a virtual machine,

11:09one's something else, I don't know,

11:11and maybe this uncovers that a cluster of virtual machines

11:16from a project that ended maybe eight months ago

11:18are still running and still billing

11:20because nobody flagged them for decommission.

11:23This kind of thing happens all the time.

11:25And so in this case, all our IT team would have to do

11:29is shut them down and formally retire those CIs,

11:34and that would cut out a chunk of the bill immediately.

11:38All right, so anyway,

11:39these are just a few additional situations

11:41where a CMDB could really help us out.

11:43Hopefully this has helped you to understand

11:45the importance of CMDBs and what they allow us to do.

0:00All right. Well, now that we've talked about the basics of CMDB and why this concept is so important

0:06in ServiceNow, the next thing we're going to do is talk about another concept, right? Another

0:12acronym, unfortunately, which is CSDM. And that stands for Common Service Data Model. Not very

0:20helpful for understanding what this thing is, but that's what it stands for. People typically tend

0:23to wonder that. So CSDM is ServiceNow's standardized framework for organizing and

0:31relating configuration and service data across the platform. Yes, I did have that definition

0:38written down. Yes, it's a mouthful. Let's talk about what this actually means in simpler terms.

0:44So the idea of CSDM, in order to understand this, let's go back to the basics of CMDB,

0:52right? A CMDB, as we saw, allows us to organize lots of individual things that IT cares about,

0:59right? Which we call configuration items or CIs and also keep track of the relationships

1:06between those things, right? So this might be related to this somehow, this related to this,

1:11this related to this, this related to this, right? All right. Now, this is great. And it's a huge

1:17step up from, you know, everyone in the organization having no idea what resources we have

1:23and how they're related. Don't get me wrong, but it's not quite enough. And here's why. CMDB answers

1:31what things exist in our organization and how do they relate. What it doesn't answer are things

1:38like what business capability does this server actually support, right? In other words, is this

1:45just supporting an internal team? Is this a critical part of, you know, the company being

1:51able to sell products on Black Friday? What does it actually support, right? Or, you know, let's

1:56talk about this CI over here. If this CI goes down, let's imagine this is another, maybe this is a

2:03database. If this database goes down, which specific customers would be affected by that?

2:10Another very important thing that CMDB alone doesn't allow us to answer, at least not easily,

2:16right? Not in a way that's automatable typically. And so the problem with CMDB alone is that it

2:23tends to become a flat pile of CIs with relationships that made sense to whoever

2:29built them at the time, but that ultimately don't compose into anything meaningful at the

2:35organization level. So again, this might sound rather abstract at this point. That's okay. You'll

2:41see how this works in much more detail as we go through the course. But really, the main thing

2:47that CSDM does is it organizes everything into five conceptual layers, right? So I'm going to

2:58write CSDM layers here, and we'll go through the exact layers and what they mean here shortly. But

3:04the basic idea here is that the higher layers are closer to the business purpose or the business

3:11goals, right? So up here, I'm going to write business goals, right? And the lower layers

3:20are closer to the technical details, right? So what servers do we actually have? How are they

3:27actually connected? So we'll write technical details there. All right. So just to give you a

3:33simple walkthrough to show you how this CSDM framework works without going into the specific

3:39layers yet, which we will do, let's take a look at a specific situation and see how each of the

3:47different pieces there falls in a different place along this spectrum, right? From business goals

3:53to technical details. Let's imagine here that you're running an online store, and one night you

4:00get an alert that a database server has crashed, right? Well, that database server, right? We'll

4:08just draw that as a little database here. For some reason, I'm very bad at drawing that all of a

4:13sudden. Let's try that again. There we go. All right. That looks a little bit more like the

4:18typical database icon that you see. So anyway, this database server has crashed, and the next

4:25question is now what, right? So in other words, even if we have a CMDB that keeps track of what

4:33this database is connected to or related to, someone's still going to have to go in there and

4:39manually figure out from those relationships which app uses this database. Does checkout use it on

4:46our application, or is it something less critical like maybe the internal employee directory that

4:51no one uses anyway, right? All right. Maybe this database is related to checkout, but is it our

4:57main revenue source, or is it a small side feature? And some additional questions here could be things

5:02like who do we call, and how urgent is this really? Does this have to be fixed now, or can this wait

5:08until morning? All right. So in order to understand how CSDM fits into all of this and kind of

5:14categorizes things by how close they are to the technical details or to the business goals,

5:20let's start at this server and kind of work our way up the chain. Let's say that this database

5:26server is part of, we'll talk about this in a little bit more detail, but there's some standardized

5:32relationships that CSDM defines for us that make it really nice and easy to come to conclusions

5:40from technical details that business execs would care about, right? And so let's say that this

5:47database server is part of our checkout application, okay? So we'll write checkout

5:54app there, right? So this would be the software that runs checkout. And maybe this checkout app

6:01delivers, that's another relationship that we'll be able to define as you'll see a little bit later,

6:07the online checkout service, right? This is the service that customers actually experience,

6:16right? So again, we're getting closer to the business goals here. And finally, this online

6:21checkout service supports the business goal of selling products online, right? So we're going

6:29to say sell products. So as you can see this, right, organizing all of these things in this way

6:38from what, you know, corporate executives would care about most to what the IT team would care

6:45about most, right? What this allows us to do is instead of an engineer sort of reverse engineering

6:51the business impact from a server name, right? The server that crashed because of this standardized

6:57framework and these standardized relationships that we'll talk about later on service now will

7:03automatically be able to calculate the business impact here. And that saves us the trouble of

7:10having to manually investigate this situation, right? So once again, hopefully this little

7:15example has taken the idea of CSDM from something more abstract to something a little bit more

7:22concrete, or at least hopefully you can see the, hopefully you can see the benefits of being able

7:28to organize things like this. But just to summarize this in an even simpler way, the CMDB as we've

7:35seen allows us to keep track of what we have and how it's related. And CSDM allows us to make

7:44deductions from that, that the business actually cares about. All right. And I'm trying to draw a

7:51light bulb there. There we go. More concretely, it allows us to go from saying this thing crashed,

7:57which affected this thing and this thing and this thing to this thing crashed. And that's going to

8:02cost us this much money per hour until it's fixed, which is a much more actionable insight.

0:00All right, so now that we've talked about the basics of CSDM

0:04and the fact that its main purpose is to allow us

0:07to organize our CMDB data more effectively

0:11and gain insight from it,

0:14the next thing that we're gonna do

0:15is we're gonna go into a little bit more detail

0:17on what those layers that I mentioned are.

0:20And by the way, these are also called domains, right?

0:23You'll hear this word used for them as well.

0:25Now, I don't remember whether I said

0:28that there were five or not in the previous video.

0:31I think I did.

0:32There are actually seven.

0:34There are different versions of this thing bouncing around.

0:37All right, this new version, right,

0:38CSDM recommendations have versions

0:41just like anything else does.

0:43They released CSDM 5.0,

0:46which is what these specific layers come from.

0:49But anyway, whether there's five layers or seven or 25

0:53or however many layers you wanna define,

0:55the main idea is still that these layers

0:59allow us to group our CMDB items, right,

1:04our configuration items more effectively

1:07and gain insight from them automatically.

1:10Don't forget that, okay?

1:11So let's talk about these layers,

1:13and I'm gonna give you some examples of these too.

1:16The first layer, which interestingly enough,

1:18isn't really part of this whole CI relationship thing.

1:23It's more like reference data.

1:26It's what's referred to as the foundation layer.

1:28So this layer, and I'm gonna kind of write

1:33the main concerns of each layer here,

1:35is the context under which the rest of the layers exist.

1:40So in other words, this tells us things like who's involved,

1:44where all of this stuff is taking place,

1:48and also things like under what agreement, right?

1:52So what contracts are there involved?

1:55That one might be a little bit confusing.

1:57I hesitated to include it, but I thought it might

2:00kind of help some people understand what this does.

2:03So anyway, this is just the surrounding context

2:07that all of these applications are taking place in, right?

2:10So these are things like users, groups,

2:14different locations, office locations, things like that,

2:17different companies, different departments,

2:19and as I said, contracts.

2:22So once again, these things are not typically considered

2:25to be part of the other layers,

2:27but they form the background or the references

2:31that we'll see in many of the other layers.

2:34That probably sounds very abstract.

2:36Please don't worry about that at this point.

2:37You will definitely have plenty of practice

2:41with these layers when we get to using them in ServiceNow.

2:45But anyway, let's go to the next layer here,

2:49which is the ideation and strategy layer.

2:55So the ideation and strategy layer

2:57answers one main question,

3:00and that is why are we building this, right?

3:04So this domain captures the demand and intent

3:10of different features or different products

3:13that our company wants to offer, right?

3:16So just to give you a slightly more concrete example,

3:19let's imagine that we're working for a company

3:23that has some sort of online banking service, right?

3:26Well, in this case, in this layer,

3:29we might find something like

3:30we want a mobile check deposit feature

3:32because we believe this will increase

3:36the number of customers, something like that, all right?

3:38So the next layer down,

3:40we have the design and planning layer, right?

3:45Many of these layers, as you'll see, have double names.

3:49I don't really know why.

3:50They didn't just pick one word for it.

3:52But anyway, the design and planning layer,

3:55the question this answers is

3:58what should this look like when it's built, right?

4:01Now, maybe that's a slightly strange way of putting it

4:04because it's not just visual, right,

4:06even though that is part of it.

4:08It's also things like, I mean,

4:10what are the specific details behind this feature

4:14that we want to offer, all right?

4:16So going back to our mobile banking application scenario,

4:20this, you know, at this layer,

4:23this is basically just a plan on paper

4:25or probably not actually on paper,

4:27but you get the idea for what the online banking app,

4:31the mobile deposits feature should be, okay?

4:35So going down to the next layer,

4:37this is where we find build and integration.

4:40I told you all of these have double names here.

4:44This layer is where we answer the question

4:46how is this actually being constructed, all right?

4:51So we'll say how is this constructed?

4:53I'll shorten that a little bit.

4:55All right, so hopefully you're noticing at this point

4:57that, again, what we're doing

4:59is we're going from more business-related concerns.

5:04Technical people might call them vague concerns

5:06like, you know, why are we building this

5:09to more technical concerns like, okay,

5:12how are we actually going to build this thing, okay?

5:15And you'll see that this pattern continues

5:18in the next layer, which is the service delivery layer.

5:25The main thing that this layer is asking

5:27is what is actually technically running

5:32from an infrastructure point of view, right?

5:36So here, we'll just say what's running.

5:40I'm gonna shorten it to that.

5:42And this is what most people think of

5:45when they think of a CMDB, right?

5:48This is where things like servers, databases,

5:51cloud instances, application components,

5:55this is really the primary layer on which those live.

6:00And I guess I should probably clarify

6:02the build and integration layer,

6:04this would be where things like source code repos,

6:09build pipelines, releases, sprints, that sort of thing lives.

6:13The service delivery layer,

6:15that's where the actual infrastructure

6:16that that stuff runs on lives.

6:19So hopefully that makes sense there.

6:20All right, so the next layer,

6:22this is where the layers sort of stop their march

6:25from business desires to actual technical details.

6:31This is the service consumption layer.

6:35All right, so this layer is where we answer the question,

6:37what does the customer, right, actually get?

6:45So we'll just say what does the customer get here

6:48in our question?

6:50All right, so ultimately this layer

6:51is the packaged sellable or usable thing.

6:56All right, so customers don't care

6:58that the application they're using

6:59uses a database or server or whatever behind the scenes,

7:02at least typically they don't.

7:04They care, do you guys offer mobile check deposit, right?

7:08And so this layer is typically the layer

7:11that shows up on things like customer facing catalogs

7:14or business dashboards, right?

7:17And finally, the last layer here,

7:19which I'm gonna try to squeeze in,

7:23this is the manage portfolios layer.

7:27And this is the layer where we ask,

7:30how does this fit into everything else that we run, right?

7:34So how does our mobile check deposit feature

7:38fit into all of the other services that we provide?

7:42All right, so anyway, those are the seven CSDM layers

7:47and the main questions that they help us address.

7:51All right, so just a sort of mental shortcut here

7:54to help you make sense of all of this.

7:56And again, don't worry

7:58if this doesn't completely make sense yet.

8:01There will come a time later in the course,

8:03I promise when you see something that ServiceNow does,

8:06you think it's a little strange

8:07and then you remember these layers and you're like,

8:09oh, that's right, okay,

8:10that's why ServiceNow chose to do things this way.

8:13So anyway, these layers here, layers two, three and four,

8:19these basically define the service before

8:23or while it's being created.

8:27Layer five here, this is the technical reality

8:32of what's running.

8:34Layer six is the business packaging of that same thing

8:39and layer seven is the management view

8:44across the entire landscape, you might say.

8:48And then layer one going way back to here,

8:50this is the shared reference data underneath everything.

8:55So hopefully that makes sense for now.

8:58Again, you will see these layers show up in ServiceNow

9:01a little bit later in the course.

9:03And when you encounter them,

9:04I hope that this video will help you make sense of them

9:07a little bit faster.

0:00All right, so at this point,

0:01we've talked about the basics of CMDB,

0:03the basics of CSDM,

0:05and the last thing that we're gonna talk about here

0:08is what's often referred to,

0:10at least in the training materials,

0:12as the three pillars of CMDB, right?

0:16So the idea here is that there are so many different aspects

0:22to, you know, managing CMDB, right,

0:26and to actually making that data useful

0:29that it's really helpful to have these three groups

0:33to kind of sort them into, right?

0:35This is actually quite similar

0:37to what we just talked about with CSDM,

0:39how it helped to, you know,

0:41kind of separate that into different areas.

0:43And so the three pillars here,

0:46which I'm gonna talk about in more detail

0:48after listing them, are one, ingest, right?

0:52This is typically how data gets into our CMDB.

0:57Two, govern.

0:59This is basically managing the data

1:02and making sure it stays up to date.

1:04And three, this is consume,

1:08or ServiceNow has recently changed this verbiage

1:10to insights, right?

1:12That's kind of the buzzword these days.

1:14So anyway, these are the three pillars

1:18of CMDB governance, you might say, right?

1:22Now the idea here,

1:23I'm just gonna go back and start with ingest.

1:25The idea with ingest,

1:28so far I've been talking as if all of these CIs, right,

1:32all of this information that we wanna store

1:36about the things that IT cares about

1:38and how they're related,

1:40I've been talking as if this is something

1:42that people are going to be entering manually.

1:45Now thank goodness this is usually not the case.

1:48Well, sometimes it is,

1:49but sometimes people will put stuff like this in manually,

1:52and we'll see how to do that

1:53a little bit later in the course.

1:54But typically this is done using automated discovery,

2:00right, I'll just write that as auto discovery here,

2:03where basically what ServiceNow will do,

2:06or whatever program you use for this discovery will do,

2:09is it will go through your network,

2:12and it will automatically find all of these CIs for you,

2:17and it will enter them into your CMDB for you,

2:21along with, again, their relationships.

2:23And so this is, you know, a much more sustainable approach

2:28than having some poor person or poor team

2:31whose job it is to regularly comb through your network

2:34and figure out how all this stuff is connected.

2:37I would never want that job, I think very few people do.

2:40And so typically this is automated.

2:44Now I wanna be very clear

2:46that this is far from a perfect process.

2:48There's all sorts of things

2:50that can go wrong during auto discovery.

2:52There's all sorts of important information

2:54that auto discovery tends to miss.

2:56But the basic idea is there, right?

2:58We want some sort of automated way

3:01to get most of the things that we want in the CMDB

3:05into the CMDB, right?

3:08All right, so once we get those things into the CMDB,

3:11and this is a continuous process, right?

3:14Your network and all the relationships in it

3:18are continually going to be sort of evolving, right?

3:22In fact, all three of these pillars

3:23are pretty continuous processes.

3:26But really the next stage here is the govern stage,

3:30or I've called them the pillars, the govern pillar.

3:34And this is the ongoing process of keeping ingested data,

3:40all of these CIs and their relationships

3:43as trustworthy as possible, right?

3:46We want these CIs to be accurate, right?

3:50We want them to represent the data

3:51that's actually out there.

3:52We want them to be current,

3:54so we don't want older versions of the data.

3:56And we want them to be non-duplicated, right?

4:00So we don't want two CIs in there

4:02representing the same thing.

4:04Now, all of these might sound obvious.

4:06You might be thinking that they're simple.

4:09They are absolutely not.

4:10And we're gonna see that later on in the course, right?

4:13So the idea here again is that

4:16no matter how good the data in a CMDB is at first,

4:21it degrades very quickly, right?

4:24Again, as soon as something changes in the real world,

4:28in your real world IT setup,

4:31the CMDB is now out of date,

4:33and an out-of-date CMDB is one that nobody wants to use.

4:37Why?

4:38Because, well, it's out of date, right?

4:39It's not the right information.

4:41All right, so for this one,

4:42I don't have a good visual like I had for ingest

4:45where we're sort of automatically

4:47adding these things into the CMDB,

4:48so I'm just gonna write those sort of three sub-pillars.

4:52I don't know if I wanna call them that,

4:53but you get the idea.

4:54The three things that we typically will want to ensure,

4:57in fact, I'll write them as A, B, and C here,

5:01which are that the data is accurate, right?

5:05That the data is current.

5:08And lastly, that the data is non-duplicated.

5:13I'll just write non-duped there, all right?

5:17So that's the idea of governance.

5:19There's lots of different pieces of governance,

5:21just as there are lots of different pieces to ingesting.

5:25And so the last pillar here

5:27is the consume slash insights pillar.

5:31This is where we use the governed data in our CMDB

5:36to help us make better decisions

5:39and add automation elsewhere in the platform, right?

5:43So again, the CMDB is typically not an end in itself.

5:47You probably won't think this

5:48by talking to your average IT person who works with one,

5:52but the ultimate goal of a CMDB,

5:55which is achieved in conjunction, as we've seen, with CSDM,

6:00is to help bring these IT concerns

6:03automatically into the business concerns realm

6:08and vice versa, right?

6:10So again, this is a drawing

6:12that I made a little bit earlier in the course, I believe,

6:13but this is where we take all of the data that's in our CMDB,

6:18all the CIs and the ways that they're connected, et cetera,

6:21and make real-world insights

6:25that business executives actually care about, right?

6:28So this is where we get,

6:29again, I'll draw that little light bulb here.

6:32There we go.

6:33For some reason, that's a really hard thing to draw.

6:35I don't know why.

6:36But anyway, that's where we turn this technical information

6:39into something that business people care about, right?

6:43So again, instead of saying things like,

6:45hey, this database needs to be updated

6:48or something like that,

6:49which most people on the business level

6:52will respond to with a blank look,

6:54we can say, hey, this database needs to be updated

6:57because it's linked to this application

6:59and could potentially have these negative effects

7:01on the business side.

7:02Again, that's what people care about

7:04up there in the business world.

7:05All right, so anyway, these are, again,

7:06the three pillars of working with CMDB data.

7:11Once again, ingesting is how we actually get the data

7:15into our CMDB.

7:16Governance is making sure that that data

7:19remains high quality,

7:21and in many cases, even improving the quality

7:23above the auto-discovery.

7:25And consume slash insights,

7:28where we take all of that curated data

7:31and turn it into business insights.

7:34So anyway, those are the three pillars.

0:00All right, well hopefully you've given this challenge a try

0:02and answered all of the questions.

0:04So what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna walk you through

0:06and give you a little more of an explanation

0:08around the answers.

0:10So the first question here was,

0:12which of the following is the best example

0:14of a configuration item, CI?

0:17I wanted the opportunity to explain this one especially

0:20because throughout this skill,

0:22I've been referring to CIs as things that IT cares about.

0:27And this, you know, this is an easy thing to say.

0:31Certainly it prevents me from having to search

0:33for more effective words.

0:35But the fact is that not all of the things below

0:40are technically CIs.

0:42In fact, only one of them is.

0:44And so by reading through them,

0:45my hope was that one in particular stood out,

0:49and that is a production database server, right?

0:53So things like help desk tickets,

0:55change requests submitted last week,

0:57a monthly status report.

0:59Obviously, you know, people working in IT

1:02care about those things in many cases,

1:05but they're not something that we can manage

1:08through a CMDB, right?

1:10In other words, these are not things

1:12that other things typically depend on.

1:15You could have a help desk ticket

1:17that maybe references a database server, right?

1:20If something is, let's say the server's down,

1:23but that does not make it a configuration item, right?

1:28And so anyway, that is the right answer for that.

1:32There we go, we got that right.

1:33Moving on to the second question.

1:34What is the primary purpose of a CMDB?

1:37We've talked about this one in pretty extensive detail,

1:40so hopefully you got this one right.

1:42And that was to provide a single source of truth

1:45about IT assets and their relationships.

1:47The other ones were, you know, clearly not the right answers,

1:50so we're gonna submit that.

1:53Clearly not the right answers,

1:54provided you watched the videos above,

1:57so hopefully you did.

1:58And so the next one, which statement best describes

2:01the relationship between CMDB and CSDM?

2:05This is something that you really would have had

2:07to watch the videos about CSDM in order to know.

2:10So CMDB replaces the need for CSDM, you never need both,

2:13that's definitely not it.

2:16The next one, CSDM is only used for financial reporting,

2:19not IT data, we know that that one's not the case.

2:21CSDM provides a structured taxonomy

2:24that helps organize and give context to CMDB data.

2:29That one is absolutely it, but let's just read

2:31the last one to make sure

2:32that that one doesn't make more sense.

2:34They are unrelated frameworks

2:35and used for different platforms.

2:36Absolutely not the case, although I did mention earlier

2:39that CMDB is not necessarily specific to ServiceNow.

2:44It's used by ServiceNow,

2:45but it's also used by other platforms,

2:47whereas CSDM is more specific to the ServiceNow platform.

2:52That's something that ServiceNow actively kind of manages,

2:55is that CSDM specification.

2:58So anyway, let's submit that, and sure enough,

3:00we got it right, and the last thing here,

3:03hopefully this one is pretty easy

3:04because we just talked about it,

3:05says in the ingest, govern, consume insights model,

3:09which stage is primarily responsible

3:11for bringing data into the system,

3:13i.e. via discovery tools or integrations?

3:16We haven't talked about discovery tools or integrations yet,

3:18but I wanted to give you a little kind of hint there

3:20of what's to come later when we get back into ServiceNow.

3:23So this one, of course, is ingest.

3:26Sometimes people get confused there

3:27and say that that's consume, right?

3:30Consuming is typically when a human user

3:34is consuming something from a system, right?

3:37When a system is getting data from somewhere,

3:39we typically call that ingestion, right, ingesting.

3:42So we're gonna submit that,

3:44and sure enough, that is the right answer.

3:45So anyway, hopefully these questions helped solidify

3:49what you already knew.

3:50In case you're wondering,

3:51you may have been expecting at this point

3:54a sort of matchup question

3:56where you had to match different things

3:58to the different layers of CSDM.

4:00I specifically didn't do that

4:02because that's something that we're gonna get into

4:04in much more detail when we start taking a look

4:08at how CSDM is actually implemented in ServiceNow.

4:11As you'll see, there's all sorts of different tables

4:14and tools we can use that will directly represent

4:19or directly reflect those domains or layers

4:22that we talked about.

4:23So we're just not really ready for that at this point.

4:25Just wanted to point that out here.

4:26So anyway, that is the solution to the challenge.

4:29So hopefully this helped to solidify your knowledge,

4:32as I said.