CMDB
A CMDB is a model of your estate. It is accurate on the day it is loaded and drifts every day after that, because the systems doing the actual work — MDM, HR, endpoint, procurement — keep changing without telling it.
Why CIs go stale
Remote laptops that never touch a corporate subnet do not get scanned, so their CI freezes at its last known state.
A transfer changes the cost center in Workday on Monday. The CI still carries the old one until the next load.
A replacement laptop is issued at the desk. The ticket closes. The CI still points at the returned machine.
A bulk import fixes a hundred records and creates a new snapshot that starts aging immediately.
The bridge
AssetView reads your CI table like any other source. It matches CIs against the reconciled record, then produces a difference list: CIs whose owner, cost center, location, or status no longer matches what the operating systems of record say.
Nothing is written to ServiceNow unless you explicitly enable a scoped write-back for named fields.
You see the CI value, the reconciled value, the source behind it, and the age of each before anything changes.
If you do enable it, each update records the source, rule, and timestamp in the CI's own history.
CIs matching no live asset, and multiple CIs matching one physical machine, are listed separately.
Side by side
| Field | CMDB CI | Reconciled | Source | Age of CI value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assigned to | M. Okafor | Priya Natarajan | Workday | 214 days |
| Cost center | Eng — Infra | Eng — Platform | Workday | 214 days |
| Serial | C02FX3QUQ6LR | C02FX3QUQ6LR | Jamf | current |
| Location | Austin — Floor 2 | Austin — Floor 4 | Jamf | 97 days |
| Status | In use | In use | Jamf | current |
The reconciled side
Each field in the reconciled record carries the system that supplied it and the rule that settled any disagreement.
LT-04821
MacBook Pro 14", M3 Pro
Resolution
Cost center conflict: Workday reflects current team assignment; Coupa reflects the purchasing team at time of order. Precedence rule for this field favors Workday. Coupa's value is kept as history, not discarded.
Next step
We run a read-only reconciliation across your MDM, HR system, endpoint agent, and procurement records, then walk you through where they disagree and why.