Managing Configuration Items › CI Reconciliation › How to Identify and Resolve Ambiguous CIs

How to Identify and Resolve Ambiguous CIs

We recommend managing ambiguity on a CI by CI basis. In each case, the Configuration Administrator must detect when ambiguity exists and determine the optimal approach. CA SDM takes a broad approach to identify and manage ambiguous CIs that are already in the CMDB.

The ambiguity index is an operational measure of the potential nonuniqueness of a configuration item (CI) or a CI transaction item, based on its identifying attributes. The ambiguity index measures the probability of one or more CIs representing the same real business object, or the probability that a CI transaction has more than one possible target CI.

Important! If you manually delete CIs with database queries, errors can occur for CIs ambiguity indexes. To avoid these errors, execute the cmdb_update_ambiguity utility and set the -full parameter to 1. This parameter helps ensure that you receive the accurate ambiguity indexes when you execute cmdb_update_ambiguity.bat or the shell script.

Use the following process to identify and resolve ambiguous CIs:

1. Identify ambiguous CIs.
   • Calculate the ambiguity index for all CIs
   • Review the list of ambiguous CIs from the Scoreboard
2. Determine if the identifying attributes for each CI are valid.
3. Resolve the ambiguous CI with one of the following actions:
   • Modify the identifying attributes
   • Exclude a CI from ambiguity management
   • Reject a CI Update by inactivating the CI
   • Supersede a CI

More information:

CI Ambiguity Example

How to Identify Ambiguous CIs and Determine if their Identifying Attributes are Valid

How to Resolve Ambiguous CIs