ITIL Service Management
Configuration Management and the Federated CMDB
According to ITIL, the goal of Configuration Management is to provide a logical model of the IT infrastructure by identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the versions of all Configuration Items (CIs) in existence. Configuration Management is at the core of effective IT Service Management. More than a simple registry of physical assets, it includes documentation, service level agreements, service catalogs, warranties and knowledge.
A CMDB (Configuration Management Database) is a repository for information about an organization's IT assets and services and their relationships. It provides a single source of data that can be referenced and shared by other IT Service Management processes.
The quality of data within the CMDB affects the efficiency of the ITIL strategy, as all processes utilize and feed into Configuration Management. IT Managers can use configuration data to improve performance, by adapting to and anticipating changing business needs while ensuring availability and security of the IT environment.
infraEnterprise and Configuration Management
The Configuration Management process within infraEnterprise maintains information about each CI and its relationship with other CIs and services within the CMDB.
The CMDB module in infraEnterprise is defined by creating services - Internet, email, application support etc., that are linked to other entities (for example, the customers who use the services, the configuration items that provide the infrastructure for the services, or the contracts that cover the services). These linkages make it easy to view and understand the relationships between items that impact and rely on services.
Intelligent integration
infraEnterprise's integration platform ensures that the CMDB is kept up to date with details of all network changes, based upon information sourced from any number of network discovery tools. For example, an organization can use infraEnterprise to source PC and server information from Microsoft Management Service (MMS) while also sourcing information on release packages from ManageSoft; this is for the complete and seamless integration of all existing data directly into the CMDB. The fully extensible integration platform means that organizations can build upon and benefit from their existing IT infrastructure, rather than having to replace existing tools simply to support the maintenance of the CMDB.
Service Impact Analysis at a Glance
Graphical representation of relationships and dependencies between IT services and assets within an enterprise is available in infraEnterprise to provide immediate visual identification of the potential cause of issues. Complex relationship information is captured, allowing the application to automatically determine the impact of relationships between groups of items. This allows end-users to graphically model "what-if" scenarios showing the down-the-line impact of taking a specified CI offline.
Officers can perform outage simulation scenarios to identify single points of failure as well as identifying the assets and stakeholders that will be impacted by the outage.
Figure 1: How CMDB interdependency information can be used to understand CI impact
The infraEnterprise Federated CMDB
The federated CMDB model addresses the resource issues associated with traditional, centralized models. Federated CMDBs are capable of automatically aggregating environmental information from network management tools and pre-existing data sources to ensure that a detailed, usable, and accurate CMDB is maintained with minimal demand on resources.
While many federated CMDB vendors require third party middleware to achieve integration, the infraEnterprise Federated CMDB is delivered in a single, fully integrated solution.
Figure 2:The infraEnterprise Federated CMDB Architecture
The infraEnterprise Federated CMDB provides out-of-the-box snap-on connectors for many off-the-shelf asset discovery and network management tools. The extensible design of the Federated CMDB's integration platform means that as new discovery tools are required, new connectors can be added to the available suite. Generic connectors are available that allow users to extract data from any SQL database or CSV file. The unique open architecture provides the freedom to develop connectors for custom-built asset discovery and network management tools.
infraEnterprise provides additional out-of-the-box capabilities for integration with Active Directory, LDAP-compliant directory tools and Computer Telephony integration (CTI).
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