The CMDB as the Brain of IT

Wednesday, 28 July 2010 15:56

Written by Gerry Roy

The human brain is amazingly complex. It gathers and stores information, processes information into knowledge, and then orchestrates action on the basis of that knowledge.

Over the years, computers have often been compared to the human brain. In fact, some enthusiasts have claimed that, owing to their processing power alone, computers may actually be superior to the brain. Nevertheless, as networks and infrastructures grow—or move to the cloud—the role of an individual computer changes. Rather than being a “brain” in and of itself, a single IT asset merely acts as one of a multitude of receptors or inputs to the greater IT machine.

The configuration management database (CMDB) is different. Unlike an individual IT asset, the CMDB gathers and stores information from across your entire data center—mainframe, distributed, physical, and virtual. Then, just as the human brain processes data from a multitude of inputs (such as sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and emotion), so, too, does the CMDB process data from clients, servers, networks, applications, configurations, and more into information. It then processes that information into knowledge and orchestrates action based on that knowledge. In this way, the CMDB may be as close to the “brain” of IT as you can get.

The CMDB Evolves

An effective CMDB should provide several advanced technologies to help process and manage the complexity associated with your IT data. These technologies should include reconciliation, federation, automatic discovery and dependency mapping, dynamic service modeling, inventory and configuration management, orchestration capabilities, and dashboards and analytics.

The CMDB serves as a single repository for all of the IT configuration and relationship data in your environment. Ensuring access from this single repository to all the transactional and specific data beyond configuration can be a daunting task. That’s where federation comes in. Federation provides the ability to consolidate data from across your enterprise to a single repository, without having to move data or replicate it in a single database. Instead, your CMDB should reference departmental data stores, such as human resources, purchasing, security, and facilities, as well as application data stores, such as SAP and Oracle. Through federation, the owners of these data stores retain authority and control, but the data is mapped to the CMDB common data model, which permits easy access by applications, such as business service management (BSM) solutions and other tools.

Even with federation, however, it’s no easy task to determine exactly what you own, where it’s located, and how it’s being used—unless you can automate the process. Automated discovery and dependency mapping will help you ensure that your CMDB is accurate and complete by discovering all assets in your IT infrastructure, along with their physical and logical dependencies and their relationships to the services they support. Look for an automated discovery solution that reaches all clients, distributed and virtual servers, mainframes, network devices, applications, databases, and more to create a dynamic accounting of all assets in your IT environment.

Once you’ve discovered all of your IT assets and collected them in your federated CMDB, you will want to map their physical and logical topologies, as well as their application and service dependencies, to gain optimal visibility into your complete IT environment. Then, you can use dynamic service modeling to create visual and dynamic maps representing the relationships of services to IT and business users and processes—even as your IT environment continually changes.

An important extension of these capabilities is inventory and configuration management, which accesses standard configurations and policies from the CMDB to ensure that only approved configurations are deployed (according to policy) and then detects and corrects any drift from those standards. Your data is only as good as your latest change, and therefore, you will want to choose a CMDB that includes drift detection as a core function.

No matter how accurate your data, however, you still leave yourself open to risk due to human error. That’s why your CMDB should also provide orchestration capabilities to automate some of the manual, repetitive tasks associated with a given process. For example, when you need to implement a change, your IT organization must perform a sequence of change, configuration, and release management processes, and it must be sure to do so in compliance with internal policies and external regulations. By automating actions according to policy, you will greatly speed process execution while also enforcing the use of best-practice processes.

Finally, look for a CMDB that provides dashboards and deep-dive analytics. These management capabilities simplify the task of actively addressing problems and making better-informed decisions in several areas, including capacity planning, data center consolidation, and virtualization.

Putting the CMDB to Work

In addition to providing value on its own, the CMDB also provides the foundation for a unified BSM architecture built on a single platform. BSM is a unified approach and comprehensive platform for running IT. Effective BSM solutions are integrated on this platform and share a single source of truth, permitting
integration of BSM processes that span multiple IT groups. As such, the CMDB helps IT improve service management and deliver value in several areas, including the following:

•    Service support — Increases efficiency and reduces risk by enabling different IT service support groups to work closely together through closed-loop incident, problem, and change processes
•    Asset and software license management — Optimizes IT asset spending, maximizes asset utilization, and reduces the cost and effort of software license management and compliance
•    Operations management — Improves performance and maximizes value through the integration of predictive analytics, capacity optimization, preventative automation, and active operational analytics

A Real-World Example

Intermountain Healthcare, a nonprofit healthcare system based in Salt Lake City, Utah, has implemented a CMDB and is reaping significant benefits. The organization has more than 30,000 employees within a system of 21 hospitals and 162 clinics.

The Intermountain IT organization is responsible for all aspects of the IT infrastructure, including data centers, networks, communications, servers, storage, and 28,000 desktop devices. Because of the critical nature of the services it provides, IT has to ensure high availability and averages greater than 99.9 percent availability on most systems.

Knowing that significant efficiencies could be gained by better management of assets, the IT staff wanted to make an accurate assessment of their inventory. The problem was that the inventory data was scattered across hundreds of databases and spreadsheets. Following IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines, the staff decided to consolidate the inventory data into a single CMDB.

The effort paid off significantly. Intermountain now has accurate data on all its IT assets, including details about each asset and the relationships among assets. With this information, the IT staff has been able to manage IT assets more efficiently through the availability of relationship information, such as “Supported By” and “Managed By” relationships that clarify responsibilities. In addition, the organization has improved alignment with financial systems by improving the ability to reconcile assets. The quality of change implementations has been improved by linking processes to assets and their relationships, thereby uncovering potential issues and risk to the services early in the planning process. The company was also able to improve problem investigation because the CMDB provided the ability to see histories of related incidents, changes, and problems.

Looking Ahead

As companies such as Intermountain have learned, the enhanced CMDB enables better-informed IT decision making by providing greater visibility into the IT environment through analytics, dashboards, and reports that use CMDB data. When other BSM solutions are added to the CMDB foundation, its value multiplies through the integration of processes within and across IT groups, including IT service support, IT operations, IT asset management, and IT planning and governance.

Now, all these groups can operate with a single source of truth, transform that data into knowledge, and use the knowledge to support decision making and orchestrate process automation. The result is greater efficiency, lower costs, higher resource utilization, and continuing compliance. That’s smart business.

About the Author
Gerry Roy, BMC Software director of Solutions Management for BMC Atrium and BMC Service Support, is responsible for the solutions strategy for the BMC Remedy IT Service Management suite of applications. He is also responsible for BMC’s service support strategy, including how service support applications integrate with other BMC solutions. Before joining BMC, Roy worked as a senior architect for Aprisma, Inc., and also with Tivoli as a product manager.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed