Managing Configuration Items › CI Reconciliation › Review and Modify Inbound Data Using Transaction Work Area (TWA)

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Review and Modify Inbound Data Using Transaction Work Area (TWA)

You can stage CI and relationship transactions before execution, by copying data into the TWA staging area. Once in the staging area, you can manipulate CIs and relationships by using the web interface or native SQL.

You also can validate the CI transactions to prevent the creation of new CIs when you should update existing CIs. In this approach, you view each transaction and the potential CIs that it can update so that you can reconcile the transaction manually to the target CI. Likewise, relationship transactions can be validated to reference the correct CIs.

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.

Review and modify ambiguous CI transactions using the following process:

  1. Identify ambiguous CI transactions.
  2. Determine if the identifying attributes for each CI transaction reconcile to the intended CI.
  3. Resolve the ambiguous CI transactions with one of the following actions:

More information:

CI Transaction Ambiguity Example

How to Identify an Ambiguous CI Transaction

How to Resolve Ambiguous CI Transactions

Manage Staged Transactions

Transaction Work Area

Populating the TWA

How to Use the Web Interface to Update Data in the TWA

Manual Reconciliation

How To Load Transactions into the CMDB

TWA Administration

CI Transaction Ambiguity Example

Transaction data from different data sources is loaded into CA CMDB. Each data source uses its own subset of identifying characteristics and may not fully identify the target CIs for the transactions. Because of this inconsistency, more CI Transactions may exist in CA CMDB than are valid.

The following is an example of CI transaction ambiguity:

Example: Ambiguous CI Transactions

The following CI transaction resides in the TWA:

The following CIs reside in CA CMDB:

Due to shared identifying characteristics, Server1 transaction is ambiguous with Server2, Server3, and Server4 in CA CMDB.

Every CI Transaction has an ambiguity index associated with it. The ambiguity index is approximately the number of existing CIs that match on any of the identifying attributes, minus one, specified in the CI transaction. The greater the index, the greater the number of other CIs that match on the transaction identifiers, and therefore the greater the probability that CI data was entered inconsistently and the possibility that additional CIs are incorrectly created. CI Transactions with an ambiguity index of zero have identifying attributes that are unique across all CIs or have a target CI specified and are therefore unambiguous.

Example: Calculate the Ambiguity Index

The following CI transactions reside in the TWA:

The following CIs reside in CA CMDB:

The first transaction (Server1) ambiguity is 0 because there is an exact match with the Server1 CIs identifying attributes. The only possible target CI to this transaction is Server1 CI.

The second transaction (Server2) is ambiguous with Server1 CI and Server2 CI.

The ambiguity index for Server2 transaction consists of the following components:

Based on shared CI identifying characteristics, the ambiguity index for server2 transaction is (1-1) + (2-1) + (2-1) = 2