Benefits of Retiring vs. Deleting Configuration Items in the CMDB

Retiring Configuration Items (CIs) in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) rather than deleting them offers several advantages that contribute to transparency and risk management. Here are some reasons why retiring CIs should be the approach to take rather than deleting.

1. Historical record: when we retire a CI, we maintain the historical record of the configuration changes. This helps with any audit or to troubleshoot past issues.
2. Dependency Tracking: CIs have dependencies with other records in the CMDB; if we retire a CI, we retain visibility into their dependencies.
3. Incident and Problem Resolution: Retiring CIs facilitates Incident and Problem resolution by identifying patterns in the historical data associated with CIs. If a CI is deleted, all that valuable data is removed.
4. Event Correlation: For event management, events related to old Configuration Items provide data for training machine learning models; the more data there is in the CMDB with related events, the better it is to identify patterns between different events.
5. Reporting and Analytics: when a CI is removed, if the CI is linked to existing reports and analytics, this will result in incomplete reports. Also, the old CIs often provide timeline of changes and this can reveal trends over time.