So, we understand what a CMDB does, its role in configuration management, and how it relates to and differs from asset management. But what does CMDB functionality look like on a more practical level? Seamless dashboards with CI metrics and analytics that make it easy to track the health of CIs, their relationships, the impact of changes, patterns that lead to incidents or problems, and the cost—in money and resources—of building and maintaining each service within an organization.
Compliance features that give you detailed records and visibility for auditors into not only the current state of CIs, but also their historical changes, checks and balances, incidents, etc. Support for federated data sets , including normalization and reconciliation of CIs and their data. IT service mapping typically a graphical illustration of relationships and dependencies.
Access controls that allow you to give different access levels to different people or teams as needed and to trace changes back to their source in case of questions or incidents. The core problems that a CMDB addresses are siloed data and outdated information. This prevents teams from understanding important context when making decisions, which can impact risk assessment and reporting, impair decision-making, slow issue resolution, and ultimately cost the business both financially and reputationally.
At best, this can cause confusion between teams. At worst, it can turn into a major incident. Forrester identifies three use cases where a CMDB is vitally important today:. Technology managers need CMDB data to plan, both at a high level with enterprise architecture and portfolio management and at a more detailed level with asset and capacity management.
IT finance requires records of applications or service codes in order to allocate billing statements and properly manage business finances. In change management, a CMDB can improve risk assessment by anticipating which users, systems, and other CIs might be impacted.
In regulated industries, it can also aid compliance, helping teams manage controls and providing a clear audit trail. In incident management, a CMDB can help identify the changes that led to an incident and get to faster resolution. Incident records can be associated with their relevant CIs, helping teams track incidents over time alongside the assets they impact.
In problem management, a CMDB can help with root cause analysis, getting teams to the heart of a problem quicker. It can also support proactive problem management by helping teams identify assets that need upgrading to reduce service costs and unplanned downtime. At the end of the day, a CMDB should reduce complexity, prevent errors, increase security, and help ITSM practices like change and incident management run smoothly.
And such a high failure rate has left the technology with a rather problematic reputation. The good news is that the reasons for failure are preventable and tend to fall into six predictable categories:. Also, the system can connect a CI from the application service only to actual CIs that exist in the CMDB , not a visualization of other items on the map like clusters or boundaries. In environments with domain separation, only CIs belonging to the same domain as the application service are added into the application service.
If there is a domain hierarchy, CIs must belong to the same child domain. Documentation Forum. Software Support Online. Software Support Downloads. Software Education Services. Submit Service Request. View Service Requests. Topics that contain the word "cat". Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations.
Two or more words in the same topic. OR or pipe. NOT not! NOT cat! Having a complete set of data about your IT environment in a centralized place so you can easily access it. Understanding the composition of critical assets and the components that they depend on. Understanding what different assets are used for and which business processes and users depend on them.
Providing information to support decision making about the IT environment, operational costs and technology decisions. Enabling risk management by providing an inventory of what technology assets you have that may have vulnerabilities.
CMDBs are not without their drawbacks though. Creating, maintaining and effectively using a large set of configuration data can be costly both in technical resources and the human attention needed to ensure quality and value.
Some of the key drawbacks of using CMDBs include:. Frequently CMDBs contain a copy of data from other source systems. As companies grow and evolve, the data set can become quite large.
To use CMDB data effectively, you will likely need tools like ITSM apps and reporting systems , data analysis skills to organize and refine the data and processes to consume the configuration data as a part of operations.
There is often a lot of confusion about the difference between configuration management and asset management in ITSM. Configuration management and the CMDB are focused on the data used to manage your assets during the period that they are live and present within your IT environment. Asset management on the other hand is the set of processes that are used to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of assets. Asset management processes often include things like procurement and purchasing, software license management, asset valuation and technology refresh processes.
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