Creating a standard reconciliation job

In most cases, you can use a standard reconciliation job or the standard rules to identify and merge your data.

You should start with a standard Identify and Merge jobs. Unless you need different identification or precedence (merge) rules, you can use a standard identification and merge job and modify the activity options while still using the standard rules.

Creating a custom reconciliation job

If you have any dataset that needs to have different identification rules or merge precedence rules, you can either edit the existing standard rules or create a custom job.

For identification, you can specify a standard rule only at class level and not at a dataset level. You can add and remove an attribute in the rule, and set a priority. For example, Chris, the configuration manager at Calbro Services, knows that for the CALBRO.APPS dataset, the TokenID, Name, and SerialNumber attributes are not sufficient to identify some instances. Chris adds the custom CalbroID attribute that identifies those instances in the CALBRO.APPS dataset, and assigns Priority 1. Because CALBRO.APPS has a priority of 1, for CALBRO.APPS, the reconciliation engine uses identification rule configured for the CalbroID attribute.

For merge, you can set a precedence value for a dataset. You can also assign a precedence value to a particular class or attribute in a specific dataset. For example a company, Calbro Services wants to keep the default precedence value of 100 for BMC_Product in the BMC Configuration Import dataset. However, they consider BMC_Product in the CALBRO.APPS dataset to be more accurate than BMC Configuration Import dataset. They assign a higher than 100 precedence value to BMC_Product in the CALBRO.APPS dataset.

The standard job contains the most common reconciliation activities:

Identifying class instances that are the same entity in two or more datasets.
Merging class instances from one dataset (such as BMC Discovery) to another dataset (by default, the production dataset is BMC.ASSET).

Important

By default, a standard job identifies and merges CIs that have not been normalized. To reconcile only CIs that have been normalized, enable the Process Normalized CIs Only option when creating a job.

Before you begin

Confirm whether the standard rules are suitable. To edit the standard rules, see,
(Identification rules) Configuring reconciliation identification rules.
(Merge rules) Creating precedence sets and associations for reconciliation merge activities.
Understand the guidelines for obtaining best results from the reconciliation jobs. For information about the guidelines, see Reconciliation best practices.

Important

When running standard reconciliation jobs, use standard identification and merge rules that are provided out of the box. When creating custom reconciliation jobs, create and use custom identification and merge rules.

If you are migrating from an older version of BMC CMDB and if a custom job uses a standard rule, you must delete those jobs and recreate the custom job with custom rules.

After recreating the jobs, perform the migration tasks.

To create a standard reconciliation job

Log in to CMDB Portal.
see, Accessing and navigating the CMDB Portal.
In CMDB Portal, select Jobs > Manage Reconciliation.
Click Create Job and enter a job name.
Select the appropriate settings for the job.
To view the details of every setting, hover the cursor over each setting.
To use the standard rules for Identify and Merge activities, select Use Standard Rules for Dataset.
To add an Identify activity, click Add activity > Identify and perform the following steps:
Steps to add Identify activity
1. (Optional) Specify a name for the activity and configure the following parameters:
  - Namespace
  - Sequence
  - Status
  - Continue on Error
2. Select Source and Production datasets from the lists.
3. In Selected Dataset, click the Standard Rules icon to use an identification rule.
4. (Optional) Set the preferences for the following options:
  - Generate IDs
  - Exclude Sub-classes
5. (Optional) In Qualification, add a qualification set to select which classes and instances to include in the identification activity.
  1. Clear the Use all classes and instances check box to restrict the Identify activity by using a qualification set.
  2. Click Select qualification ruleset to select a qualification set.

To add a Merge activity, click Add activity > Merge and perform the following steps:

Steps to add Merge activity

(Optional) Specify a name for the activity and configure the following parameters:
- Namespace
- Sequence
- Status
- Continue on Error
Select Source and Target datasets from the lists.
Important

You can select multiple datasets as a source dataset in the Merge activity instead of creating multiple jobs to merge data into the same production dataset.
In Selected Dataset, click the Standard Rules icon to view and add the standard merge precedence rule for the selected dataset.
Select a Precedence association set for the datasets selected for this activity.
In a standard reconciliation job, BMC Default Precedence set is selected by default and cannot be changed.
To change the values in the precedence association set, see Creating precedence sets and associations for reconciliation merge activities.

Set Merge Order based on your requirements:

Merge order	Description
By Class in separate transactions	The CIs are merged one class at a time. Only after the CIs in a class are merged, the CIs from the next class are merged. Tip: Use this option to keep the reconciliation performance high.
Related CIs in one transaction	All CIs are merged at the same time.
Related CIs in separate transactions	Only the CIs that belong in a hierarchy are merged at a time.

(Optional) Select Include Unchanged CIs.

To add Purge activity, click Add Activity > Purge and perform the following steps:
Steps to add Purge activity
1. (Optional) Specify a name for the activity and configure the following parameters:
  - Namespace
  - Sequence
  - Status
  - Continue on Error
2. Select Source dataset from the list.
3. (Optional) In Qualification, add a qualification set to select the classes and instances to be purged.
  1. Clear the Use all classes and instances checkbox to restrict the Purge activity by using a qualification set.
  2. Click Select qualification ruleset to select a qualification set.
4. In Purge Instances, select the desired option:
  - Identified and unidentified - Both identified and unidentified instances are purged.
  - Identified - Only identified instances are purged.
  - Unidentified - Only unidentified instances are purged.
5. (Optional) To verify the instances that are marked as deleted in the target dataset, select Verify Soft Deleted in Target Dataset.
(Optional) Select a schedule for the job run frequency.
Click Save.
(Optional) To run the job immediately, open the job from All Job Run Activities and click Start Job.

Important

Changes made to the new job definitions are delayed until the next scheduled Job Definition check interval parameter runs. To load the changes immediately, open and save the job from the UI.
If a class does not have any standard identification rule associated with it, the rules defined for the parent class are applied by default. If you want to change the default rules, create a custom identification rule.

Creating a standard reconciliation job

Before you begin

To create a standard reconciliation job

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