CIS-DF Certified Implementation Specialist - Data Foundations (CMDB and CSDM) Questions and Answers

The Related items panel displays records associated with the selected CI, including active incidents, problems, changes, and other task-related information. This allows the Service Desk Manager to move from the CI’s topology to the operational records currently affecting or involving that CI.

The Overview panel presents summarized CI information. The Attributes panel displays field values belonging to the CI. The Application services panel identifies service associations and dependencies, but it is not the primary panel for listing related Incident and Problem records.

Unified Map is intended to combine CI details, relationships, service context, and operational information in a single graphical experience. Its filtering capabilities also allow users to focus on relevant CI types and business-critical elements when analysing a service or CI topology.

Therefore, Related items is the panel that provides the required active task information.

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A CMDB delivers business value when it enables better outcomes across IT and enterprise service delivery—especially when aligned with CSDM so services, offerings, and supporting technology are connected in a consumable model. Two major business values are improved operational execution and improved business continuity.

Option C is a direct business value: a trusted CMDB improves incident and change management by providing accurate CI details, relationships, and service context. This supports faster triage and assignment, better prioritization, and higher-quality impact analysis for changes. When incidents and changes are informed by dependable configuration data, organizations reduce downtime, avoid unnecessary escalations, and make safer change decisions—benefits that the business experiences as higher service quality and fewer disruptions.

Option D is also a core business value: CMDB strengthens operational resiliency by enabling clearer dependency understanding and faster response to failures. Resiliency improves when teams can quickly identify what’s impacted, understand upstream/downstream relationships, and plan mitigation steps using known service-to-technology mappings. In regulated or mission-critical environments, this translates into better continuity, reduced risk exposure, and improved compliance reporting.

Option A can be beneficial, but it is more of a technical/operational mechanism than a primary “business value” statement in Data Foundations framing. Option B is primarily the domain of IT Asset Management and financial systems; while CMDB can relate to assets, it is not the system of record for financial management. Hence, the best two business values are streamlining incident and change management and strengthening operational resiliency.

Foundation → Use the base system tables when implementing CSDM to get the highest value from ServiceNow products and the Now Platform.

Design and Planning → Understand CIs related to Business Applications and related capabilities; identify redundancies, monitor costs, and make better investment decisions around the roadmap.

Service Consumption → Understand Business Services, ownership, cost, scope of work offered to business consumers, and request access to business services.

Service Delivery → Understand Technical Services, Technical Service Offerings, service support, and all relationships to underlying technology CIs.

CSDM separates data into domains so organizations can model business planning, consumption, and technical delivery without mixing concerns. The Foundation domain provides base reference data such as users, groups, companies, locations, and foundational tables used across the platform. Design and Planning supports architecture and portfolio planning through Business Applications, Business Capabilities, and Information Objects. Service Consumption focuses on how services are exposed to and consumed by business users through Business Services and Business Service Offerings. Service Delivery focuses on how services are technically operated using Technical Services, Technical Service Offerings, Application Services, and supporting infrastructure CIs. This separation is what makes CSDM valuable: each domain answers a different management question while still connecting to a unified service model.

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The correct answer is Create CMDB Groups with type Health by region . CMDB Health scores can be scoped to meaningful CI populations by using CMDB Groups. When a Configuration Manager needs region-specific health visibility, the correct design is to define CMDB Groups that represent the regional CI population and set the group type appropriately for health evaluation. This allows the dashboard to calculate and display scores for the relevant subset of CIs instead of only showing global or class-level scores. There is no standard “Group scores by region” switch that automatically creates regional scorecards. Customizing scheduled jobs is also a poor approach because it introduces unnecessary technical debt and can interfere with platform-supported health calculations. CMDB Groups provide the governed and supported way to scope health reporting to regional CI populations.

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The correct answer is Basic Info because the class icon is a class-level property, not an attribute, relationship, or CI list configuration. In CI Class Manager, the Basic Info tab is where administrators manage core metadata for a CI class, including class name, label, description, table details, principal class settings, and visual representation such as the class icon. The Suggested Relationships tab is used to define or review recommended relationship patterns between CI classes. The CI List tab is used to view records belonging to the class. The Attributes tab is used to review or manage inherited and class-specific attributes. Since the question specifically asks where the UNIX Server class icon can be changed, the correct location is the Basic Info tab.

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The correct answer is Service Graph Connector . Service Graph Connectors are ServiceNow-supported ingestion solutions designed to bring third-party data into the CMDB using governed, repeatable, and upgrade-safer patterns. They are built to align with CMDB class models, Identification and Reconciliation Engine processing, source tracking, and ServiceNow data quality practices. This reduces custom scripting, unsupported mappings, and long-term maintenance burden. A generic vendor-provided integration may work, but it can introduce technical debt if it bypasses IRE, writes directly to CMDB tables, or uses unsupported mappings. Import Sets and Transform Maps can be used, but they require careful scripting and governance to avoid duplicates. Table API is the riskiest option because direct table writes can bypass CMDB identification and reconciliation logic. Therefore, Service Graph Connector is the best method to minimize technical debt.

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In the CMDB Health Dashboard, the format Healthy CIs / Evaluated separates two different meanings. The Evaluated value represents the total number of CIs included in the metric calculation scope. The Healthy CIs value represents how many of those evaluated CIs passed the metric. In this question, 60,000 server records were evaluated for the Duplicate metric, so 60,000 server records are in scope. Of those, 59,000 are healthy, meaning they are not considered duplicate according to the duplicate evaluation logic. The remaining 1,000 are not healthy for that metric and require investigation or remediation. Option B incorrectly treats the healthy count as the scope. Option C identifies the unhealthy difference, not the evaluated scope. Option A invents a Linux/Windows breakdown that is not provided by the scorecard. Therefore, the evaluated scope is 60,000 server records.

In Data Foundations, “Govern” includes maintaining consistency between closely related data domains so that operational and asset lifecycle processes remain trustworthy. For hardware endpoints (and other asset-backed items), Asset and CI records often represent the same real-world item from two perspectives: financial/lifecycle management (Asset) and operational/service context (CI). Automatic synchronization prevents drift such as different owners, locations, or statuses appearing in Asset vs CI, which can cause reporting errors, incorrect fulfillment decisions, and audit issues.

The platform supports synchronization through out-of-box synchronization logic (commonly implemented as business rules and related configuration) that updates the CI when an Asset changes, and updates the Asset when a CI changes—so the records stay aligned regardless of which team updates which record. Therefore, ensuring the Asset-to-CI update logic is active (A) and the CI-to-Asset update logic is active (B) is the right way to keep data synchronized automatically.

Option C is not required for synchronization; the intent is near real-time consistency driven by record changes, not batch jobs that run later. Scheduled jobs might exist for other maintenance activities, but they are not the primary mechanism for keeping Asset/CI synchronized. Option D is important as a data quality principle—ideally one Asset maps to one CI for physical items—but “ensuring one-to-one mapping” is not the automation mechanism itself. Automation is achieved through the active synchronization logic, which is why A and B are the correct answers.

CMDB 360 / Multisource CMDB extends the standard IRE by enabling Dynamic Reconciliation Rules, which determine attribute values dynamically based on incoming data patterns rather than fixed source priority.

Within the Create Reconciliation Rule wizard, two supported dynamic rule types are:

Most Reported (Option B): selects the attribute value that is reported most frequently across all sources. This is useful when multiple sources contribute data and consensus is a strong indicator of correctness.

Last Updated (Option C): selects the most recently updated value, which is useful for rapidly changing attributes such as IP address or operational state.

Option A (Smallest Value) and Option D (Last Created) are not supported dynamic reconciliation rule types in ServiceNow.

Dynamic reconciliation rules are particularly valuable in complex, multisource environments where rigid source precedence is insufficient and data confidence must be inferred.

Therefore, the correct answers are B – Most Reported and C – Last Updated.

The correct answer is Technology Management Service Offering, also called a Technical Service Offering. In CSDM-aligned configuration, Technical Service Offerings can be related to Dynamic CI Groups so that operational ownership values are synchronized to the member CIs. This includes the Support Group, which is used by ITSM processes for routing incidents, problems, and operational work. A Dynamic CI Group alone defines CI membership, but it does not provide the service-offering ownership context by itself. A Technology Management Service represents the broader technical service, while the offering is the consumable operational layer that carries support and management group information. CI Class Manager is used for class and schema configuration, not for automatically maintaining CI support groups. Therefore, the correct mechanism is the Technology Management Service Offering.

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Within the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), information objects are used to represent non-CI data entities that provide important business or governance context but are not configuration items themselves. These objects are especially important when extending service visibility beyond pure infrastructure and application relationships.

The use case described in Option A—understanding asset lifecycle compliance in a Business Application context—explicitly requires information objects. Asset lifecycle data (such as financial state, depreciation, warranty, and compliance milestones) is typically managed in IT Asset Management (ITAM) and must be associated to Business Applications without converting every asset-related data point into a CI. Information objects enable this linkage while maintaining clean CMDB boundaries.

Option B focuses on event-to-incident automation, which relies on CIs, technical services, and operational relationships, not information objects. Option C (proactive case management) is primarily a CSM and service offering use case. Option D (SecOps risk context) relies on application services and business application relationships, not information objects. Option E (business service impact) is addressed through service modeling and service mapping, again without requiring information objects.

Information objects are introduced as organizations mature and need to integrate governance, financial, or compliance data with service and application models—making asset lifecycle compliance the correct match.

Therefore, the correct answer is A.

The CMDB Health Dashboard is available as part of the ServiceNow CMDB capability and does not need to be separately downloaded from the ServiceNow Store or enabled through a special dashboard system property. The dashboard framework is available by default for authorized users. However, this question is specifically asking what must be done to start using the dashboard, not what is required to refresh calculated scores. Health calculations and score updates depend on scheduled jobs, but the dashboard itself is not something the administrator downloads or separately installs. Option A is a common trap: scheduled jobs are needed to generate current health scores, but they are not the action required to activate or obtain the dashboard. Therefore, the best answer is that nothing additional is required because the dashboard is activated by default.

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Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (200–300 words)

Within ServiceNow Data Foundations, CMDB Data Manager provides multiple policy types to support governance, data quality, and lifecycle management of configuration items (CIs). The scenario described—confirming that servers recorded in the CMDB physically exist in the data center—is a classic example of existence validation and ownership confirmation, which is exactly the purpose of an Attestation policy.

An Attestation policy is designed to request a human validation from a responsible individual or group (such as a data center manager, platform owner, or infrastructure team). The policy generates attestation tasks that require reviewers to explicitly confirm whether a CI is valid, accurate, and still exists. This aligns directly with CMDB governance best practices and ITIL 4 Service Configuration Management, where periodic verification ensures trust in the CMDB as a system of record.

The other policy types do not meet this requirement:

Certification is typically used to validate compliance with defined data standards (e.g., mandatory fields populated), not physical existence.

Delete, Archive, and Retire are lifecycle actions, used after a CI has already been identified as obsolete or no longer required.

None of these options involve human confirmation of real-world existence.

From a CSDM and Data Foundations perspective, attestation supports:

CMDB accuracy and credibility

Audit and regulatory compliance (especially critical in financial services)

Clear accountability for CI ownership and validation

Therefore, when the goal is to confirm that servers actually exist, the correct and fully aligned CMDB Data Manager policy type is Attestation (E).

CMDB 360, also known as Multisource CMDB, preserves source-specific CI information instead of retaining only the final reconciled value. Administrators can therefore examine the latest values contributed by individual sources and identify missing, inconsistent, or conflicting attribute values. This source-level history also allows the platform to recalculate the winning CMDB value after reconciliation logic changes, without requiring each source to submit its data again.

Option B is therefore correct because stored multisource data supports recomputation following a reconciliation-rule change. Option D is correct because CMDB 360 records the latest source contribution and makes it available for comparison and analysis.

Option A is misleading. Standard IRE reconciliation rules can use discovery sources even when CMDB 360 is not enabled; CMDB 360 enhances visibility and recomputation but is not what makes basic source-priority rules possible. Option C describes the broader role of CMDB Health or Data Foundations dashboards rather than CMDB 360. The guide identifies source-value gaps and differing source values as the principal insights delivered by CMDB 360.

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In ServiceNow, controlling source precedence when multiple authorized data sources update the same CI attributes is a core responsibility of Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) governance.

The correct and supported method is to assign priority to each data source in reconciliation rules. Reconciliation rules determine which source wins when multiple sources attempt to update the same attribute on a CI. By defining source precedence, the Configuration Manager ensures that the most authoritative system of record (for example, Discovery over manual imports, or HR systems over spreadsheets) consistently controls specific attributes or classes.

Option B is incorrect because manually sequencing data source runs is unreliable, does not scale, and violates Data Foundations best practices. Option C only controls how often data is refreshed, not which source is authoritative. Option D is incorrect because identification rules are used to uniquely identify CIs—not to control attribute-level precedence.

Using reconciliation rules provides deterministic, auditable, and automated control, which is essential for maintaining CMDB trust and avoiding data conflicts.

Therefore, the correct answer is A – Assign a priority to each data source in reconciliation rules.

The correct answer is C . In CSDM and Application Portfolio Management, a platform should be modeled as a Business Application with the architecture type Platform Host . Applications that run on or are provided by that platform should be modeled as Platform Applications and should reference the platform host. In this scenario, the ServiceNow Platform is the platform host, while Incident and Change are platform applications because they are capabilities delivered on the ServiceNow Platform. The relationship is not best represented by making all three applications generic web-based applications. That would lose the platform/application distinction. The preferred model is also not simply a Depends On relationship, because CSDM provides a more specific platform host reference model for this use case. Therefore, ServiceNow Platform should be Platform Host, and Incident and Change should be Platform Applications referencing ServiceNow Platform.

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Identification rules are configured through CMDB CI Class Manager . These rules define how the Identification and Reconciliation Engine determines whether an incoming CI already exists or whether a new CI record should be created. For server records, identification rules usually rely on attributes such as serial number, name, hostname, hardware identifiers, or other class-specific criteria. If these rules are weak or missing, duplicate server records can be created during Discovery, Service Graph Connector imports, or other integrations. The CMDB Health Dashboard detects health issues such as duplicates, but it is not where identification rules are configured. CMDB Workspace provides operational access to CMDB capabilities, but CI Class Manager is the correct configuration location. CMDB Data Manager governs lifecycle policies, not IRE identification logic. Therefore, the correct answer is B.

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Health Inclusion Rules are used to control which CI records are included in CMDB Health calculations and dashboard display. This is exactly what the question requires: filtering specific CI classes or CI populations so that only relevant and management-ready data contributes to health reporting. Identification Rules are used by the Identification and Reconciliation Engine to determine whether an incoming CI matches an existing CI or should create a new record. Reconciliation Rules control which data source can update specific attributes. Data Refresh Rules are not the correct CMDB Health scoping mechanism. Health Inclusion Rules allow organizations to exclude irrelevant, transitional, retired, unmanaged, or not-yet-ready CIs from health scoring so the dashboard reflects meaningful and actionable data. Therefore, A is correct.

In Data Foundations, “Configuration” includes modeling CI relationships in a way that reflects real-world technology dependencies and supports operational use cases such as impact analysis, troubleshooting, and service mapping. For “Application Servers host Applications,” the scenario describes that multiple Application Servers can host one or more Applications. In most enterprise environments, the reverse is also true: an Application can be hosted across multiple Application Servers (for example, horizontal scaling, clustered deployments, active-active architectures, and separate servers for different tiers or components of the same application).

Because both sides can have multiple related records, the correct logical relationship is many-to-many:

One Application Server → hosts many Applications

One Application → can be hosted on many Application Servers

In ServiceNow CMDB terms, many-to-many relationships are represented through the CMDB relationship model (parent/child relationships), enabling the platform to store multiple relationship records linking servers and applications without forcing an unnatural single-reference constraint. This supports better CMDB quality and stronger downstream outcomes—especially for incident triage (“what apps are affected if this server is down?”) and change impact analysis (“what servers could be impacted if we change this app component?”).

A one-to-many or many-to-one model would incorrectly restrict either the server to one application or the application to one server, which does not align with common hosting patterns and would reduce the CMDB’s usefulness and accuracy.

Removing obsolete or inactive CIs from the CMDB must be handled carefully to avoid data loss, audit issues, and unintended operational impact. In ServiceNow, the recommended and governed approach is to use an archive policy.

Archive policies are designed to manage CI lifecycle cleanup based on defined conditions such as class, last updated date, lifecycle status, or operational state. In this scenario, the condition would target Linux Server CIs that have not been updated in six months. Archive policies can either archive or permanently delete records in a controlled, auditable manner, ensuring compliance with data retention and governance standards.

Creating a business rule (Option A) is strongly discouraged for bulk CMDB cleanup because it introduces technical debt, upgrade risk, and unpredictable side effects. A scheduled job (Option C) may automate execution but lacks governance logic and lifecycle awareness on its own.

Archive policies integrate with CMDB Data Manager, provide visibility into actions taken, and support approval and rollback where appropriate. This aligns fully with Data Foundations best practices for maintaining a lean, accurate, and trusted CMDB.

Therefore, the correct and recommended action is B – Create an archive policy.

Agent Client Collector

Automated agent-based solution running patterns

Import Sets

Organization-built solution using transform maps

Service Graph Connector

Pre-built store integration solutions that require minimal customization

ServiceNow Discovery

Automated agentless solution running patterns

Agent Client Collector: This is ServiceNow ' s agent-based approach. It requires a software agent to be installed on the target host to run discovery patterns locally.

Import Sets: This is the traditional, manual way to bring in data. You define the source, and the organization builds the logic (Transform Maps) to move that data into the CMDB.

Service Graph Connector: These are found in the ServiceNow Store. They are " certified " integrations built to work with specific third-party vendors (like SCCM or Jamf) with minimal setup.

ServiceNow Discovery: The classic agentless method. It probes the network and uses patterns to identify and map CIs without needing software installed on every machine.

Within ServiceNow CMDB governance, Attestation and Data Certification serve distinct but complementary purposes. The key difference lies in what is being validated.

Attestation is focused on existence and ownership confirmation. When a CI is attested, the assigned user or group is asked to confirm that the CI still exists, is still relevant, and is still owned or managed by the appropriate team. No detailed attribute-level validation is required. This lightweight process is commonly used to prevent “ghost CIs” from lingering in the CMDB.

Data Certification, on the other hand, is more rigorous. It requires the certifier to validate specific attributes of the CI, such as lifecycle status, support group, environment, or service relationships. Certification ensures data correctness and completeness, which directly impacts CMDB Health scores and downstream processes like Change and Incident Management.

Options A, B, and C incorrectly describe these mechanisms or their assignment and scheduling capabilities. Both attestation and certification can be scheduled and assigned flexibly, but their validation depth is what truly differentiates them.

Therefore, Option D correctly describes the distinction: attestation confirms existence, while data certification validates CI attributes.

Life cycle mappings are used to review how legacy CMDB status values correspond to the newer CSDM life cycle stage and life cycle stage status model. This is a key governance activity during transition from older status fields to CSDM-aligned lifecycle management. The mapping layer allows administrators to understand and control how legacy operational values translate into standardized lifecycle stages and stage statuses. This prevents inconsistent reporting, incorrect CI retirement behavior, and confusion between old and new status models. A choice list only stores selectable values and does not provide the mapping relationship between legacy status and CSDM lifecycle fields. Life cycle properties may control behavior but do not serve as the review location for legacy-to-CSDM value alignment. Therefore, when reviewing equivalent legacy status and CSDM lifecycle values, the correct location is Life cycle mappings.

The Asset-CI Field Mapping capability is specifically designed to control synchronization between related Asset and CI records. The Configuration Analyst can create or configure a field-mapping rule so that the Computer CI’s Owned by value is propagated to the corresponding Asset field through the platform’s supported synchronization framework.

CI Class Manager controls CMDB class definitions and does not create parent-child inheritance between Asset and CI tables for field synchronization. A scheduled integration could copy the information, but it introduces unnecessary processing and delay when an out-of-box synchronization mechanism exists. A scripted business rule could also work technically, but it introduces custom code, maintenance effort, and upgrade risk.

Using Asset-CI Field Mapping provides a governed, supportable, and reusable configuration that keeps the operational CI and financial Asset perspectives aligned.

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Service Graph Connectors are a key Data Foundations ingestion capability in ServiceNow. They provide out-of-the-box, upgrade-safe integrations that ingest data into the CMDB using the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE), ensuring data quality and source governance.

Two primary categories of Service Graph Connectors are:

Cloud (Option A): These connectors integrate with major cloud providers and platforms (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP) to ingest infrastructure, platform, and service data into the CMDB. They are essential for managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and maintaining accurate cloud CI relationships.

Observability (Option B): These connectors integrate with monitoring and observability tools (such as APM, infrastructure monitoring, and telemetry platforms). They provide near-real-time operational data that enriches CI records and supports incident correlation, impact analysis, and service health insights.

Option C (DevOps) is incorrect because DevOps integrations are typically handled through CI/CD tools and workflow integrations rather than Service Graph Connectors. Option D (Workflow Automation) is unrelated; Service Graph Connectors focus on data ingestion, not process orchestration.

Therefore, the correct connector categories are Cloud and Observability, making Options A and B the correct answers.

In CSDM version 5, enterprise-wide capability tracking is firmly positioned within the Design and Planning domain. This domain is specifically intended to support Enterprise Architecture, Portfolio Management, and Strategic Planning use cases, making it the correct choice for an Enterprise Architect working across the organization.

The Design and Planning (Design) domain focuses on answering “what the business needs and how it should be designed” before services are built or delivered. It includes core concepts such as Business Capabilities, Value Streams, Information Objects, Business Applications, and Architectural relationships. Business capabilities represent what an organization does to achieve its objectives, independent of organizational structure, technology, or implementation. This abstraction is essential for enterprise architects, especially in highly regulated industries like financial services, where strategic alignment and impact analysis are critical.

The other domains do not fit this requirement:

Foundation provides shared reference data (companies, locations, users) but does not model enterprise capabilities.

Build and Integration focuses on application development, CI/CD pipelines, and integration layers.

Service Consumption is concerned with customers, offerings, and how services are consumed.

Service Delivery models the operational and technical delivery of services, including infrastructure and runtime environments.

From a Data Foundations and CSDM governance perspective, tracking enterprise capabilities in the Design and Planning domain ensures:

Clear separation between strategy, design, and operations

Alignment with ITIL 4 strategy and planning practices

Strong support for impact analysis, rationalization, and transformation initiatives

Therefore, Design and Planning (D) is the correct and fully aligned CSDM 5 domain for tracking enterprise capabilities.

Service Mapping creates and maintains an Application Service by discovering the application’s entry point and tracing its dependencies across the supporting infrastructure. The resulting service map can include application components, servers, databases, middleware, load balancers, and communication relationships. This produces the service-aware topology required for impact analysis, incident investigation, and change-risk assessment.

ServiceNow Discovery identifies infrastructure CIs and can create technical relationships between discovered components, but Discovery alone does not normally build the complete, application-centric service topology requested in the question. Agent Client Collector gathers inventory and telemetry from devices through an installed agent, while Event Management processes and correlates operational events and alerts.

The study material identifies Service Mapping as the capability that builds Application Service topology and shows how services are supported by underlying applications and infrastructure. It also describes top-down Service Mapping as the recommended high-fidelity approach for mission-critical Application Services.

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The correct approach is controlled consolidation rather than preserving unnecessary custom classes or deleting records indiscriminately. CI Class Manager should be used to review the class hierarchy, identify suitable out-of-box ServiceNow classes, and govern the target data model. The existing CIs should then be moved or reclassified into those standard classes, with custom attributes mapped carefully to corresponding standard or approved extended attributes.

Retaining fragmented classes preserves the exact reporting and integration problems described in the scenario. Deleting the custom classes and manually recreating every CI is unnecessarily destructive and risks losing relationships, historical references, source information, and task associations.

Data Foundations recommends using existing supported classes wherever possible and extending an appropriate class only when the required model does not exist. Standardized classes improve inheritance, reporting, identification, reconciliation, Discovery integration, and upgrade compatibility.

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When the Identification and Reconciliation Engine encounters multiple existing records that satisfy the applicable identification criteria, it must select a record for processing while identifying the duplicate condition for later remediation. For this automatic IRE processing behaviour, the record with the most recent update date is selected for the incoming update.

This should not be confused with the Duplicate CI Remediator’s guided selection of a Main CI . During manual remediation, factors such as the oldest creation date, number of related records, historical task references, and business relationships can influence which CI should ultimately be retained. That is a separate governance process from the IRE’s immediate handling of incoming data.

Option A incorrectly selects the newest-created record, while Option C applies a main-record retention principle to the wrong stage of processing. IRE first identifies incoming records using identification rules and then applies reconciliation rules to control authorized updates and source precedence. This governed processing is what prevents uncontrolled insertion and overwriting of CI records.

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A CI class is set as a Principal Class from the Basic Info tab in CI Class Manager by selecting the Principal Class check box. Principal Classes are important because they control which CI classes are treated as primary, operationally meaningful classes in CMDB processes and reference fields. For example, Principal Classes influence which CIs appear in key task fields such as Configuration Item fields on Incident, Change, and other ITSM records. This keeps users from selecting low-level or irrelevant child records when the business process expects a meaningful CI. There is no separate requirement to click a dedicated Principal Class UI Action, and it is not configured through a Yes/No choice list in this scenario. The Basic Info tab exposes the class-level property directly, so checking the Principal Class checkbox is the correct configuration action.

Enhancing Incident Management in ServiceNow often involves integrating complementary products that enrich context, prioritization, and decision-making.

Discovery strengthens incident resolution by automatically populating accurate CI data and relationships, allowing responders to quickly understand affected infrastructure and applications.

Hardware Asset Management (HAM) adds visibility into asset lifecycle, ownership, and maintenance actions, which is especially valuable when incidents involve physical devices or failures.

Risk Management (part of IRM) provides insight into business and financial risk exposure, helping teams prioritize incidents based on potential regulatory, safety, or financial impact.

Service Portfolio Management (SPM) connects incidents to the service lifecycle, enabling better understanding of whether an incident affects a live, retiring, or planned service—and improving communication with stakeholders.

Together, these integrations transform Incident Management from a reactive process into a context-rich, business-aligned capability.

CMDB 360, also known as Multisource CMDB , provides attribute-level visibility into the data contributed by different discovery and integration sources. It enables an administrator to examine which source supplied a particular attribute, compare competing values, identify missing source contributions, and understand how reconciliation selected the final value stored on the CI.

The guide explains that CMDB 360 reveals gaps in attribute data and differing attribute values across sources. These insights help administrators diagnose reconciliation conflicts, inappropriate source precedence, incomplete integrations, and inconsistent discovery results.

CMDB 360 is not itself the mechanism used to ingest records. Service Graph Connectors, IntegrationHub ETL, Import Sets, and Discovery perform ingestion. CMDB 360 instead preserves and exposes the source- level contributions after ingestion so that data owners can investigate and improve multisource data quality.

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When transitioning to CSDM-aligned lifecycle management, ServiceNow introduces a structured lifecycle framework that separates high-level intent from detailed operational state.

Life Cycle Stage represents the macro phase of a CI’s existence (for example: Plan, Build, Deploy, Operate, Retire ).

Life Cycle Stage Status refines that phase with granular, sub-level states that vary by CI type.

Life Cycle Object determines which lifecycle stages and statuses apply, based on what kind of CI is being managed (hardware, application, document, etc.).

Life Cycle Mapping ensures a safe transition from legacy status fields by translating existing values into standardized CSDM lifecycle values—avoiding data loss or process disruption.

Together, these objects enable consistent lifecycle governance, improve reporting accuracy, and support automation across ITSM, ITOM, and IRM use cases—while remaining backward compatible with legacy CMDB data.

The Assignment Group attribute on the CI provides the operational routing information needed to direct work to the responsible technical team. When the affected CI is associated with the change, governed group information from the CMDB can be used to populate or determine the appropriate assignment group, reducing manual routing and preventing the change from being assigned incorrectly.

The Approval Group serves a different purpose: it identifies a group responsible for approval decisions rather than the team that performs the work. A Service Offering can provide service, environment, entitlement, or consumption context, but it does not by itself identify the resolver group for this question. Service Subscriptions identify service consumers and are not task-assignment mechanisms.

A trusted CMDB therefore improves Change Management by supplying accurate ownership and group information, enabling dynamic routing and clearer accountability.

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The CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard helps administrators assess whether important CMDB data is valid, properly configured, and aligned with expected data quality practices. It is designed to surface actionable gaps and risks, then guide remediation through playbooks. Therefore, B and C are correct. The dashboard does not automatically remediate all risks by itself; it guides administrators and data owners toward corrective actions through structured playbooks. It also is not primarily a custom metric development framework. Its purpose is to provide curated, ServiceNow-aligned metrics and remediation guidance for CMDB and CSDM maturity. This makes it useful for improving data health, identifying configuration issues, and supporting governance without requiring custom reporting or manual analysis from scratch.

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The Walk stage introduces the service-model relationships required to connect business-facing services and offerings to the Application Services that technically enable them. At this stage, the organization has progressed beyond foundational CMDB population and begins establishing service context for operational processes.

Relating Business Service Offerings to Application Services allows service owners to determine which technical services support each consumable business offering. This enables impact assessment, outage communication, change-risk evaluation, and identification of affected consumers. The guide explains that the Walk stage establishes Business Services and their relationships with Application Services and infrastructure so the CMDB can support Incident, Problem, and Change impact analysis.

Crawl primarily establishes foundational CI data and ingestion controls. Run and Fly represent more advanced operationalization and optimization. Foundation is a CSDM domain rather than the appropriate maturity stage for this relationship.

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The correct answer is Relationship Map. In CMDB Workspace, the Relationship Map is used to visualize how Configuration Items are connected through CMDB relationships. This is useful when a Configuration Manager needs to understand dependency paths, parent-child relationships, hosted-on relationships, application-to-infrastructure relationships, or other CI-to-CI connections. Unified Map is more service-oriented and is typically used to understand the composition of a service and related operational context. Business Service Map is focused on service-level visualization rather than general CI relationship inspection. Since the question asks specifically how CIs are connected to each other, the most precise tool is the Relationship Map.

A CMDB Data Foundations Dashboard playbook provides a Problem Overview and information about likely Root Causes . The Problem Overview explains the deficient metric, why the condition matters, and the operational or governance risks created by poor performance. The Root Cause material helps administrators identify why the condition exists, such as incomplete source data, incorrect transformations, missing ownership, inappropriate class usage, or weak governance controls.

The guide describes these playbooks as structured, prescriptive guidance for identifying root causes, assessing ingestion and governance gaps, and applying appropriate corrective actions.

Playbooks may recommend analysis, correction, reporting, and governance activities, but they do not normally provide fully automated remediation scripts that should be executed without review. “Problem Analysis” is not the named documentation component tested here; analysis is instead performed through the recommended remediation plays.

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The CMDB and CSDM Data Foundations Dashboards are obtained from the ServiceNow Store as a free application. This is different from the standard CMDB Health Dashboard, which is part of the platform CMDB capability. The Data Foundations Dashboards provide guided visibility into CMDB and CSDM readiness, maturity, and remediation opportunities through metrics and playbooks. They are intended to help organizations improve CMDB quality and CSDM alignment without building custom dashboards from scratch. Option A is incorrect because this specific dashboard application is not simply active by default. Option B is incorrect because it is not a paid Store application. Option C is incorrect because the correct source is the ServiceNow Store, not Innovation Lab. Therefore, the correct answer is D.

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In CMDB modeling, accurately defining relationships is critical for impact analysis, service mapping, and Change Management. In this scenario, Application Servers can host multiple Applications, and Applications can also run across multiple Application Servers (for example, in clustered, load-balanced, or distributed architectures).

This architectural reality defines a many-to-many relationship between the Application Server table and the Application table.

In ServiceNow, many-to-many relationships are common for application hosting models, especially in modern environments that use horizontal scaling, redundancy, or containerized workloads. Modeling this correctly ensures that incidents, changes, and outages affecting a single server can be accurately traced to all impacted applications—and vice versa.

A one-to-many or many-to-one relationship would incorrectly assume exclusivity in one direction, which does not reflect real-world application deployment patterns. A one-to-one relationship would be even more restrictive and inaccurate.

Therefore, the correct relationship type is A – Many-to-many, which aligns with CMDB best practices and CSDM service modeling principles.

CMDB Workspace provides governed experiences for both duplicate remediation and CMDB Data Manager policy administration. Duplicate CI records can be investigated and remediated through the de-duplication dashboard in CMDB Workspace. This purpose-built interface centralizes duplicate identification, comparison, prioritization, and controlled remediation rather than forcing administrators to use generic task lists.

CMDB Data Manager is also available from the Management area of CMDB Workspace. An authorized administrator can create, publish, and manage policies, including certification policies that validate designated CI attributes and generate tasks for responsible users.

Discovery execution is performed through Discovery administration capabilities, not CMDB Workspace. New class creation is performed through CI Class Manager rather than being one of the direct CMDB Workspace actions tested here. Therefore, A and D are correct.

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The correct option is Allow fallback to parent’s rules . In CI identification, ServiceNow evaluates the configured identification rule for the target class first. If the Tomcat rule cannot find a match using its class-specific criterion attributes, fallback behavior allows the Identification and Reconciliation Engine to attempt matching against the parent class identification rule. Since Tomcat is a more specific application class, falling back to the parent Application identification rule helps prevent unnecessary duplicate records when a match cannot be made at the subclass level. “Applies to” defines the class or scope for the identifier entry. “Independent” controls whether a rule is evaluated independently rather than through parent inheritance. “Criterion attributes” are the fields used for matching, not the fallback setting. Therefore, the correct configuration is Allow fallback to parent’s rules .

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The CMDB Health Dashboard is a central component of CMDB Data Foundations insight and governance. It measures and tracks data quality using well-defined health indicators that focus on the accuracy, relevance, and usability of CI data.

Two key data quality areas included in the dashboard are Stale CIs and Duplicate CIs.

Stale CIs (Option D) refer to configuration items that have not been updated within a defined time window. These records are risky because they may no longer reflect the current state of the environment, leading to inaccurate impact analysis, poor change decisions, and misrouted incidents. Monitoring staleness helps organizations identify where discovery, integrations, or ownership processes are failing.

Duplicate CIs (Option E) occur when the same real-world asset or service is represented by multiple records. Duplicates undermine trust in the CMDB, distort reporting, and break service mappings. The CMDB Health Dashboard highlights duplicate trends and integrates with de-duplication and remediation workflows to address them.

Options A (Downgraded CIs), B (Upgraded CIs), and C (Missing CIs) are not standard CMDB Health Dashboard quality dimensions. While “missing” data may be inferred through completeness checks, Missing CIs as a category is not directly tracked.

Therefore, the correct answers are D – Stale CIs and E – Duplicate CIs, which are core CMDB Health indicators used to maintain high-quality configuration data.

The query must contain the Application Service and Configuration Item nodes, the appropriate relationship between those nodes, and filters that restrict the results to the named Application Service and operational CIs.

Option A only adds Operational Status and Name as result columns. Displaying a field as a column does not filter records according to that field, so non-operational CIs could still appear.

Option C unnecessarily adds the Business Application class. The requirement is to find CIs belonging to a specific Application Service; no Business Application condition or relationship is required. Adding unnecessary classes can complicate the query and potentially alter its results.

CMDB Query Builder is designed to traverse relationships between CMDB classes. The guide similarly explains that Application Services and their related infrastructure should be represented through a CMDB query and connected through CMDB relationships.

Therefore, the correct sequence is Option B.

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The CMDB Process Owner is accountable for the overall Configuration Management process and its governance framework. This includes establishing data standards, defining ownership and stewardship expectations, coordinating remediation processes, monitoring CMDB health, and ensuring that identification and reconciliation practices support trustworthy data.

A CI Analyst performs operational work on assigned CI classes, including updating records and resolving specific CMDB-related tasks. However, the analyst does not own organization-wide governance standards. A CMDB Architect designs the CMDB data model and technical architecture, while a Service Owner is accountable for a particular service. The IT Asset Manager focuses primarily on financial, contractual, and asset-lifecycle information.

Because the requirement covers organizational standards, cross-source data quality, and ongoing governance accountability—not merely individual record maintenance—the CMDB Process Owner is the correct role.

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CSDM significantly enhances Change Management by providing service-aware context, enabling better planning, risk assessment, and stakeholder communication.

One key benefit is the ability to identify blackout windows (Option A). Through CSDM-aligned Business Services, Service Offerings, and service calendars, Change Managers can clearly see when services are unavailable for change due to business constraints, regulatory requirements, or peak usage periods. This helps prevent changes from being scheduled during high-risk windows.

Another critical benefit is the ability to understand the impact of the change on services (Option D). CSDM establishes clear relationships between infrastructure CIs, Application Services, and Business Services. When a change is proposed, these relationships enable accurate impact analysis, allowing Change Managers to assess risk based on business criticality rather than just technical scope.

Option B (root cause determination) is primarily a Problem Management function. Option C (dynamic routing of changes) is driven by workflow and approval logic, not directly by CSDM.

Therefore, the correct answers are A – Identify blackout windows and D – Understand the impact of the change on services.

Delete and archive policies are designed for end-of-life CMDB lifecycle governance. They should apply to records that are no longer active operational CIs and have reached an appropriate retired state. End of Life - Retired is the correct lifecycle state because it indicates that the CI has completed its useful operational lifecycle and can be governed through archival or deletion according to retention rules. Applying delete or archive policies to Inventory - Available records would be dangerous because those CIs may still be valid and usable. “In any lifecycle state” is wrong because unrestricted archival or deletion can remove active, dependent, or operationally important records. “Missing - Stolen” is more aligned with asset disposition and exception handling, not the standard CMDB Data Manager delete/archive target state. Therefore, these policies should affect servers in End of Life - Retired.

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CMDB Query Builder provides purpose-built Export Query and Import Query functions for transferring saved query definitions between ServiceNow instances. The administrator selects the saved query, exports its definition as an XML file, and the receiving team imports that file using the Import Query function. The imported definition then appears in the destination instance’s Saved Queries tab.

Exporting the query as a report would transfer report configuration rather than the complete Query Builder canvas and relationship definition. A generic record-level XML export is not the prescribed Query Builder workflow.

ServiceNow also documents transfer through an update set, but identifies that process as an alternative maintained for backward compatibility. Because the question asks for the direct and recommended Query Builder approach, Option A is the best answer.

This question tests understanding of how the Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) evaluates incoming CI data against Identification Rules and their priority order in ServiceNow.

From the identification rule shown:

Serial number (+ type) → Priority 100

Serial number → Priority 200

Name (Hardware) → Priority 300

MAC address + name (Network Adapter) → Priority 400

For a CI to be identified and matched, the incoming record must satisfy one complete identifier entry exactly as defined for that class.

CI1 (Name match only)

Although the name matches an existing Hardware CI, name alone is a low-priority identifier (300) and is not sufficient to uniquely identify a Hardware CI unless no higher-priority identifiers exist and the identifier entry criteria are fully satisfied. In practice, Hardware identification relies on serial number–based identifiers, not name-only matching, to avoid false positives. Therefore, CI1 cannot be confidently matched and is inserted as a new record.

CI2 (IP address match)

IP address is not part of any Hardware identification rule shown. IP address is typically used for discovery correlation or network relationships, not as a primary Hardware identifier. Since no identifier entry includes IP address, CI2 does not match any valid identification rule and is also inserted as a new record.

Because neither CI satisfies a valid identifier entry, both records are inserted as new CIs.

The Run tab in the CSDM Data Foundations Dashboard focuses on enabling operationalized, risk-aware use cases, including Integrated Risk Management (IRM) and Entity Scoping. These use cases require organizations to understand what data is processed, where it resides, and which technical components are involved, rather than only service impact for ITSM.

Information Objects play a central role at this stage.

Option A is correct because Business Applications related to Information Objects allow organizations to identify what types of data (PII, PCI, PHI, regulated data) are processed by each business application. This relationship is essential for risk classification, regulatory compliance, and audit scoping in IRM. Without it, risk assessments lack data sensitivity context.

Option D is also correct because Logical CIs (such as databases, schemas, or data stores) related to Information Objects establish where sensitive data is stored or processed at a technical level. This enables IRM to trace risk from business context down to technical exposure, supporting control testing, issue management, and remediation prioritization.

Option B (Location hierarchy) supports foundational data quality but does not directly enable risk or entity scoping. Option C (Business Applications to Application Services) is critical for service impact and Change/Incident Management, but it is more aligned to service operations rather than risk and data-centric scoping, which is the focus of the Run playbooks for IRM.

Therefore, the correct answers are A and D, as they directly support IRM entity scoping, regulatory analysis, and risk visibility through CSDM-aligned data modeling.

In ServiceNow, Vulnerability Response and Security Incident Response rely heavily on business context to accurately assess risk, prioritize remediation tasks, and communicate impact to stakeholders. From a CSDM (Common Service Data Model) perspective, this context is primarily delivered through properly modeled relationships between Application Services and Business Applications.

The “Application Services with Business Application Relationships” Get Well Playbook directly addresses this requirement. In CSDM, Application Services represent the technical, deployable services that run in the environment, while Business Applications represent the logical applications that support business capabilities. When these two are correctly related, security teams can clearly understand which business processes, customers, and revenue streams are affected by a vulnerability or security incident.

Without this relationship, vulnerabilities may still be detected, but they lack meaningful prioritization. For example, a critical vulnerability on an application service supporting a revenue-generating or customer-facing business application should be addressed far more urgently than one tied to a low-impact internal tool. This relationship is what enables risk-based prioritization, rather than purely technical severity-based prioritization.

The other options do not fulfill this need. Location hierarchy issues (Option A) and CI lifecycle status consistency (Option D) relate more to CMDB hygiene and governance, not security context. Product ownership gaps (Option C) affect accountability but do not directly enable risk estimation during security response.

Therefore, Option B is the correct and CSDM-aligned Get Well Playbook for ensuring sufficient business context in Vulnerability Response and Security Incident Response workflows.

CMDB groups can represent either a deliberately selected set of CIs or a dynamically maintained population. For a static grouping, administrators can manually select the required Windows Server CIs and associate them with the named group.

For a dynamic grouping, an encoded query or equivalent CMDB query condition can identify records based on class and attribute criteria. For example, the query can select active Windows Server CIs in a particular location, environment, or support group. As CI records begin or cease to meet the conditions, group membership can be updated accordingly.

Tag-based mapping is principally associated with cloud-native Application Service mapping rather than the standard mechanism described for CMDB group membership. Reconciliation rules determine which source can update CI attributes; they do not assign CIs to operational groups based on source priority. Dynamic CI groups are designed to maintain membership through defined filtering criteria.

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The Crawl stage establishes the initial CSDM foundation and design information required to create a usable CMDB. This includes identifying applications, their ownership, associated Application Services, foundational reference data, and essential relationships.

The Application Owner provides authoritative information concerning the Business Application, including ownership, lifecycle, criticality, purpose, and portfolio context. The Application Service Owner provides operational knowledge about the deployed Application Services, their environments, support arrangements, and relationships to underlying CIs.

The guide explains that Crawl addresses the Foundation and Design domains. Foundation establishes organizations, locations, users, groups, products, and core CI information, while Design introduces Business Applications, capabilities, processes, Information Objects, ownership, and architecture context.

Business Service Managers and Technology Service Owners become more central as business-facing and technical services mature during later stages. Customer Service Managers are primarily associated with service consumption. Therefore, B is correct.

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The correct answer is that all related CIs are displayed in the Affected CIs related list. A Dynamic CI Group is used to represent a dynamically maintained set of CIs based on defined membership criteria. In this case, the group contains all Windows servers. When the group is referenced on a Change form, the practical purpose is to apply the Change to the group members rather than manually selecting each Windows Server CI. The Affected CIs related list is the correct place to represent the individual CIs impacted by the Change. Impacted Services are derived from service relationships and impact calculations, not simply from group membership. Therefore, referencing the Dynamic CI Group causes its related member CIs to be represented as affected CIs for the Change.

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A web server is a software-based CI hosted on underlying server hardware or a virtual machine. The standard ServiceNow relationship is therefore Runs on::Runs . From the Web Server CI’s perspective, it runs on the Server CI. When the same relationship is viewed in the reverse direction, the Server runs the Web Server.

The reverse wording in Option B incorrectly changes the parent-to-child direction. “Uses::Used by” represents a dependency or consumption relationship, not the direct hosting relationship between installed software and its host. Option D reverses that unrelated relationship type.

ServiceNow documentation defines Runs on::Runs as the standard relationship between a software application CI and its hosting hardware or virtual machine, giving Tomcat running on a Linux server as an example. Discovery can automatically identify and load these CI relationships into the CMDB.

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The Correctness scorecard evaluates whether CI data accurately represents the real environment. It includes the Duplicate , Orphan , and Staleness metrics.

Duplicate identifies cases where the same real-world configuration item is represented by multiple CMDB records. Orphan identifies CIs that lack expected relationships or supporting context. Staleness identifies records that have not been updated within the configured period and may no longer represent active infrastructure.

The other choices belong to different CMDB Health KPIs. Audit belongs to Compliance because it evaluates whether CI values satisfy defined standards or desired-state conditions. Required and Recommended belong to Completeness because they measure whether mandatory and useful attributes are populated.

Therefore, Duplicate, Orphan, and Staleness are the metrics shown under Correctness.

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In Data Foundations, “Insight” focuses on turning configuration data into actionable visibility. CMDB 360 (often associated with Multisource CMDB capabilities) provides a guided experience in CMDB Workspace for exploring CI data and running queries across sources. Within this experience, Saved Queries are managed directly under the CMDB 360 area of CMDB Workspace because they are part of the CMDB 360 query-and-analysis workflow.

A CMDB 360 Saved Query is not the same as a generic CMDB Query Builder query created from classic navigation modules. The CMDB 360 experience typically uses a tile/window approach where users can view existing saved queries, create new queries, modify them, and run them to retrieve CMDB 360 data aligned to multisource reporting and analysis. Keeping saved queries on the CMDB 360 tab makes them easy to discover and reuse for repeatable insights (for example, coverage and source comparisons, CI data quality checks by source, and targeted investigation of records).

The Insights tab in CMDB Workspace is generally used to understand adoption and health-related insights about CMDB features, not as the primary location for creating CMDB 360 multisource saved queries. “Coverage” is a specific lens/view and does not represent the saved-query creation workspace. “CMDB Query Builder” is a related capability, but the question explicitly asks where CMDB 360/Multisource Saved Queries are viewed and created in CMDB Workspace , which is the Saved queries window on the CMDB 360 tab.