Prevention of duplicate CIs using naming rules
You can prevent the creation of duplicate authorized CIs during the actual CI promotion process by using naming rules that you import from the integration framework.
During promotion, the naming rules provide additional search criteria for finding an existing authorized CI to link to. As a result, the likelihood of success in finding the authorized CI is greatly improved, preventing the unwanted creation of a second authorized CI because the existing one could not be found.
Duplicate CIs can occur when an authorized CI already exists at the time an actual CI (not already linked to the authorized CI) is promoted. For example, the authorized CI might have been imported using the integration framework or created through procurement. If the promotion process fails to find this existing CI, it creates a new one, and now you have an unwanted “duplicate.”
To address this problem, the promotion process enhances the standard DIS GUID search with a second search. The second search employs naming rules to help locate an existing CI that can be linked to the top-level actual CI being promoted.
Naming rules
Naming rules define a set of criteria meant to uniquely identify a CI. They are imported using the integration framework. Naming rules rely on either attributes or relationships to match and link CIs. The rules are often used to link authorized CIs to actual CIs, but can also be used the other way around. Here they are used during promotion to link actual CIs to existing authorized CIs, and improve the chance of finding the authorized CIs when they exist. In this case, the use of naming rules can prevent a new authorized CI from being created because the existing CI was not found using just the standard search criteria.
- If your naming rules are not finalized or you do not have full confidence in them yet.
- If you do not create authorized CIs prior to discovering actual CIs, importing them, and promoting them.
- To improve promotion performance. If you are sure that you have no unlinked authorized CIs prior to importing your actual CIs, disable naming-rule linking.
For more information on naming rules, how to create them, how to import them, and how to create links from authorized CIs to actual CIs, see Linking authorized CIs to actual CIs using naming rules.
Promotion process
The promotion process first tries to link a selected, top-level actual CI to authorized CIs by using a DIS GUID. If the Check for Existing CIs Using Naming Rules option is enabled in the Actual Configuration Items application, promotion does more. If the DIS GUID search yields no matches, promotion uses the naming rules to find existing CIs that match the selected, top-level actual CI. If an authorized CI is found that matches either the DIS GUID or the naming criteria, the promotion process links the actual CI to the matching authorized CI. Promotion then updates that CI based on the update promotion options specified by the user. If no matching CI is found, a new CI is created. The first matching CI found is linked to the currently selected actual CI. The next time you promote that actual CI, promotion will not link it because it is already linked.
Note that naming rules that contain relationships rely on linking related CIs, rather than on matching attributes. So if the naming rules specify related actual CIs, it is possible that some child actual CIs could also get linked to authorized CIs during processing.
Before promoting any actual CIs, if you have authorized CI versions of your related actual CIs that are not required to link their top-level actual CI, you can link them from the Configuration Items application using the Link to Actual CIs action. Then, when promotion is run, the associated CIs are already linked and duplicates will not be created.