Remediating a drift for an unapproved change

Acknowledging a drift

You can choose to acknowledge a drift and defer taking any remediation action in the following scenarios:

• In your IT environment, you can perform pre-approved changes, such as weekly scheduled upgrades or patches, without initialing a change request. The upgrade or patch changes are scanned into BMC Helix CMDB. Drift is detected when a regularly scheduled comparison job runs.
• Due to an off-hours escalation, a patch to a server had to be quickly applied without a change request.

To acknowledge a drift

1. Acknowledge drifts in one of the following ways:
   • From the Drift Console: Select the Drift Report containing the drifts you want to acknowledge and click Acknowledge.
   • From the Drift Report Details pane: Select a CI or a group of CIs and click Acknowledge.

2. From the Attributes pane of the Drift Report Details screen, you can see the Status column shows the status as Acknowledged.

   Important

   • The attribute status of Acknowledged is overwritten by the next run of the comparison job. To avoid seeing these drifts again with the next comparison job run, you must update the baseline of the job to reflect the current state of BMC Helix CMDB.
   • For the off-hours escalation scenario, create a change request to make an approved change and update the baseline of the comparison job.

Creating a change request from Drift Console

You can create a change request directly from the Drift Console. The advantage of creating a change request from the Drift Console is that the CIs experiencing drift are automatically related to the change request.

Using Change Management, you must manually associate each CI to the change request.

Before you begin

• You must have Change Master or Change User and Drift Master or Drift Admin privileges to create a change request.
• Only a Change Manager, or users with Change Configuration permissions, can create change templates for their support group.
  See Managing-drift-management-permissions for instructions on how to set up these permissions.
• Drift management does not support a change request template in which the Timing field is set to Expedited.
  All other Timing field values are supported.
• A change request template must exist before you can create a change request through drift management.
  You do not need to create a new template if existing templates are available.
• Auto Assignment is configured for your company or as -Global- in the Change Management Rules.
  Configure this by using the Application Administration Console in the Mid Tier . This ensures that the Change Manager Group is assigned automatically if the templates consumed by drift are not populated with the assignment information.

• Assignment Engine Integration is enabled in Change Management Rules. For steps to enable Assignment Engine Integration, see Configuring change rules.

To create a change request template

1. From the Mid Tier, open the Application Administration Console.
2. Click the Custom Configuration tab.
3. From the Application Settings list, select Change Management > Template > Template, and then click Open.
   The Change Template form appears in New mode.
4. Press F2 to open the form in Create mode.
   The Infrastructure Change Templates form appears.
5. After configuring all your settings, click Save to add the new template to the list of available change templates. For more information, see link in new in BMC Helix ITSM online documentation.

To create a change request from Drift Console

1. From the Drift Console, select the Drift Report for which you want to create a change request.
2. Select the Change Requests tab, and click Create Change.
   The CIs displayed in the Specify CIs pane of the change request are the same CIs displayed on the Configuration Items (CIs) pane of the Drift Console.
3. Select a Change Template.

4. From the Specify CIs pane, select the CIs for which you want to create a change request.
   You can select multiple CIs at the same time.

   Warning

   When selecting CIs, select only CIs with a drift type of Added or Modified to place in a single change request. CIs with a drift type Removed must be placed in a separate change request and not combined with CIs of drift type Added or Modified because, depending on the drift type, a different baseline and target is used.

5. Click Create.
   After a few moments, a change request ID is created and displayed.
6. Click OK.
   The change request with a Draft status is created.
7. To see the CIs associated with this change request, click the Relationships tab.
8. Click Close.
   The change request you created using Drift Management goes through the standard process flow for a new change request.
   
   After the change request is implemented and you run the same comparison job, the status for that particular attribute is updated from New to Addressed.

To create an incident request from the drift console

You must have Incident Master or Incident User and Drift Master or Drift Admin privileges to create an incident request. To ensure that the incident is created successfully, the templates must be created by a user having a record in the CTM: People form.

1. From the Drift Console, select the Drift Report for which you want to create an incident request.
2. Select the Incidents tab and click Create Incident.
   The CIs displayed in the Specify CIs pane are the same CIs displayed on the Configuration Items (CIs) pane of the Drift Console.

3. Select an Incident Template.

   Important

   If you encounter an error when you select an incident template, check the DSM:INTHPD:AutomationDriftIncidentTemplate form. If the First Name and Last Name fields are blank, enter the correct information and save the form to continue with the incident template selection.

4. From the Specify CIs pane, select the CIs for which you want to create an incident request.
   You can select multiple CIs at the same time.
5. Click Create.
   After a few moments, an incident request ID is created and displayed.
6. Click OK.
   The incident request with an Assigned status is created.
7. To see the CIs associated with this incident request, select the Relationships tab.
8. Click Close.

The incident request you created by using drift management goes through the standard process flow for a new incident request.

Incident request creation does not affect the status of a drift.