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Stale CIs and Retirement Rules

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In this lesson, you will learn:

  • Why stale CIs are a problem
  • What CMDB Data Manager policies do
  • SNWR’s retirement policy

🔁 Quick look back: Last time: CMDB Health for Discovered CIs. You learned how CMDB Health tracks the quality of discovered CIs.

1 The Problem: Retired Servers Stay ‘Operational’ Forever

When a server is switched off, Discovery stops finding it. But the CI stays. Over time:

  • The CMDB fills with servers that don’t exist.
  • Agents pick dead CIs on incidents.

🎯 The problem: Retired servers stay ‘Operational’ forever.

👉 The fix: Use a CMDB Data Manager policy to retire CIs not seen for a set time.

Lifecycle from seen to retired.
Figure 1. SNWR’s retirement policy.

2 CMDB Data Manager

Key term: CMDB Data Manager

A tool that runs policies to retire, archive or delete CIs, with review tasks.

Key term: Retire policy

Moves CIs that meet a condition to Retired, often after review.

3 Doing it safely

  • Start with a review task, not automatic retirement.
  • Use a long enough gap, like 30 days.
  • Retire, don’t delete. History stays.

4 Project Clear View: How We Implemented It

📍 Situation: The 4 retired servers from the old list were still in the CMDB.

🧭 Decision: Create a retire policy with review, and use it for those 4 first.

🛠️ Steps we took:

  1. Created a policy: servers not discovered for 30 days.
  2. Set it to create a task for Hana.
  3. Ran it: the 4 retired servers got tasks.
  4. Hana confirmed; they were retired.

✅ What we verified:

  • The 4 are retired, with history kept.
  • The policy runs weekly.

📁 Evidence: The policy, listed in the migration matrix.

5 Quick recap

  • Discovery can’t retire CIs on its own.
  • CMDB Data Manager policies retire CIs under rules.
  • Start with review tasks.
  • Retire, don’t delete.

6 Check yourself

Think of your answer first. Then tap to check.

1 Why don’t old CIs disappear by themselves? Show answer

Discovery stops updating them, but doesn’t remove them.

2 How long does SNWR wait before a retire task? Show answer

30 days without discovery.

3 Why retire instead of delete? Show answer

History, like past incidents, is kept.

Nice work! SNWR’s CMDB won’t fill with dead servers. 🎉
Next up: Ownership and Data Certification

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