Correlating a drift with a change request


A drift displayed on the Drift Console might be the result of a change request that has been submitted, as briefly shown in the following example:

Example

At Apex Global, a business-approved standard requires that all laptops in the Technical Support Group be upgraded from 1 GB of memory to 4 GB.

A change request with ID 007 is submitted, approved, and implemented in relation to the memory upgrade requirement. A discovery application scans the laptops and updates the Memory attribute of the CIs in CMDB.

A few days later, an scheduled comparison job checks all laptops against a baseline with the memory as 1 GB. Drift is detected by the comparison job for all the Technical Support laptops because CMDB shows a value of 4 GB in the Memory attribute. 

Related topics

Remediating-drifts

Configuring-drift-management

In this example, drift is detected because the baseline used in that comparison job is as per the old business standard. However, because the memory upgrade was a pre-approved change, this drift is easily correlated to a change request and the baseline is updated for this comparison job. 

How is a drift correlated with a change request?

To determine whether a drift is due to an approved change request, the drift management change request correlation service compares all CIs that show drift to all change requests in the Change Management database containing that CI, irrespective of the drift type. The change correlation service only considers the CIs associated with a change request and the tasks associated with a change request relating to a CI. If the change request refers to a CI that has drifted, then the drift is correlated to a change request.

Configure a drift correlation with a change request in the following ways:

Any change request correlated to a drift is displayed on the Drift Console > View Details screen. The following image shows the change requests related to a drift:

100645-Drift7500UG-60.gif

For each drift that is correlated to a change request, the following information is provided:

  • Status
    Displayed in the Attributes pane.

    Status

    Description

    New

    The drift is new and cannot be correlated to a change request created from drift management. If the drift is correlated to a change request created outside of drift management, the results are shown in the Change Requests tab.

    Addressed

    The change request correlated with the drift was created within drift management to resolve the drift when it was found in a previous comparison job.

    Acknowledged

    The drift is acknowledged using the Drift Console Acknowledge option. For information about acknowledging drifts, see Acknowledging a drift.

  • Change request ID, correlation type, and change request status 
    Displayed under the Changes Request tab depending on how you configured the correlated drift to the change request status in Preferences > Change Status Filter.
    If you configured the change request status for Scheduled and Completed, only change requests in Scheduled and Completed status are displayed.
    For more information about the change request ID, correlation type, and change request status, see Viewing Drift Reports.
    View the details of the change request form in the Details tab.
    Within the Change Request form, select the Relationships tab. You will see the same CIs that are displayed in the Drift Reports Detail window.

 

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