Cleaning up Stale CI Relationships in ServiceNow

Summary

Cleaning up stale CI relationships in ServiceNow is a common challenge that is unfortunately not well addressed by ServiceNow out of the box. To quote a colleague of mine, ServiceNow’s guidance is basically “I dunno, you guys figure it out”😆. More officially they do state that this is something you need to DIY. Doug Schulze of ServiceNow does offer an unofficial solution which offers good guidance.

I decided to try coming up with a simple scheduled script that could serve has as a starting point. Ultimately something like this would be best in a script include.

Solution

Some folks have gone with a simple, delete all relationships where the parent or child is retired, but you might risk losing important connections like a reference to a process document. It may be best to limit the cleanup to the relationships needed to show clean Service Maps.

This script will:

• Find/Delete all relationships for retired items where parent is hardware
• Find/Delete all relationships where parent is cmdb_ci_appl based class and child is retired hardware
• Find/Delete all relationships where parent is cmdb_ci_service based class and child ci is retired