SOLUTION WHITE PAPER
Confi guration Management Database (CMDB)
Table of Contents
ABSTRACT
...1INTRODUCTION
...2CORNERSTONE OF SERVICE SUPPORT ...2
SOLUTIONS THAT ENABLE THE CORNERSTONE ...5
BUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT
...6Abstract
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL
®) is the standard for industry best practices for IT Service
Man-agement, which includes Service Support and Service Delivery. Service Support is the reference
book most commonly used within the IT industry. Service Support, as defined by ITIL, has six
main elements:
>
The Service Desk
>
Incident Management
>
Problem Management
>
Change Management
>
Configuration Management
>
Release Management
Each of these six elements integrates with and depends upon the other. Often, integration of
applica-tions simply means passing key data from one database into another to ensure the correct information
is available to the management process. This exchange creates issues related to duplication and
owner-ship of data. Typically, the solution has been to consolidate this data together into a single database,
shared by all relevant service applications, as dictated by a particular process.
A better method is to create a single view accessible by all users, thus ensuring that data owners
remain data owners, protecting the existing investment in service support applications by enabling
inte-gration in a federated
1manner. This is the idea behind a configuration management database (CMDB).
The term cornerstone can be defined as:
1. A stone that forms the base of a corner of a building, joining two walls
2. A vital part or basis: sugar was the cornerstone of the economy
Whichever definition you prefer, the idea is the same — without the cornerstone, any structure
even-tually crumbles or fails. The cornerstone concept aptly describes the CMDB within any IT service
management solution.
This paper discusses the function, benefits, and importance of a CMDB and why it has become the
cornerstone of IT service support. Business Service Management (BSM), the BMC
®Software strategy
of managing IT from a business perspective, will also be reviewed in conjunction with the
award-win-ning BMC Atrium
TMsolution.
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Introduction
A common theme throughout ITIL is the need for a cen-tralized view of IT Service Management data—essential to delivering consistent, reliable, effective, and efficient service to the business customers. This centralized view is referred to as the configuration management database (CMDB).
Adhering to ITIL guidelines, Configuration Management must:
> Account for all the IT assets and configurations within
the organization and its services
> Provide accurate information about configurations and
their documentation in order to support all other Service Management processes
> Provide a sound basis for Incident Management,
Problem Management, Change Management and Release Management
> Verify the configuration records against the
infrastruc-ture, and correct any exceptions
The CMDB is the cornerstone of Service Management whether or not you adopt ITIL standards. When you do not know what infrastructure items you have, where they are, how they are related, their current status and their full history, you cannot effectively manage your IT infrastructure. For example, during the Y2K crisis, some estimates claimed that as much as 70 percent of revenue was spent locating infrastructure asset items and only 30 percent was spent on the necessary technology updates.
Today, just five years past Y2K, many organizations are again struggling to identify their infrastructure items in order to comply with governance requirements detailed by Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox) or Basel II regulations. With an accurate CMDB and a good Change Management policy, meeting the requirements of Sarbox or Basel II can be accomplished faster and cheaper. Both are about managing operational risk, which, from an IT perspective, can only be done by understanding the IT infrastructure and adhering to the ITIL processes to avoid disruption to the IT services that in turn directly affect vital business functions (VBFs) and the underpinning data.
Cornerstone of Service Support
Most of the information an organization needs to suc-cessfully adhere to ITIL guidelines can be housed with a CMDB. ITIL briefly describes a CMDB as:
“A database that contains all relevant details of each Configuration Item (CI) and details
of the important relationships between Configuration Items.”
The key phrases here are relevant details and important re-lationships. Relevant detail refer to the attributes and fields allocated for each CI type. This requires careful planning when designing the CMDB. For a better chance of suc-cess, consider the requirements of other ITIL processes when assigning attributes (refer to CMDB Utilization in Table 1 of this paper). Important relationships is a critical factor because it is these relationships that differentiate the CMDB from a simple database, one that contains a list of items and their attributes (e.g., an inventory or as-set database).
Being able to identify and display relationships makes the CMDB a decision and risk-analysis resource. For exam-ple, if a server should fail, the service desk can instantly identify which customers and services are affected by the failure. Or, a manager can check the potential effect of a change before authorizing the submission of a Request for Change (RFC).
The configuration item (CI) referred to in the CMDB defi-nition above is a component of the CMDB, described by ITIL as:
…a component of an infrastructure that is (or is to be) under the control of Configuration Management. CIs may vary widely in complexity, size,
and type, from an entire system to a single module.
Throughout the lifecycle of a configuration item (CI), all as-sociated activity must also be maintained within the CMDB, creating an audit trail of actions, incidents, problems, and changes made to that CI. This is vital to understanding what is occurring to the CIs and provides the necessary details for problem resolution, change-risk assessment, and total-cost-of-ownership awareness.
Table 1 (page 3) shows some of the key servies that the CMDB can provide to other ITIL processes. To keep the table within sensible proportions, only five services are shown for each ITIL process or function, whereas in re-ality there are many more potential and actual services provided by having a comprehensive and accurate CMDB.
The strength of ITIL does not come from just a set of processes and functions, but from the processes incorpo-rating cross-functional integration. The relationship between Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management illus-trates this point very well:
1. The Service Desk solves an issue for a customer and completes an incident record. (The original inci-dent may have been raised by another ITIL element, such as Event Management, part of Infrastructure Communications and Technology Infrastructure Management.)
2. Incident Management notifies Problem Management, where a problem record is opened or an existing prob-lem record is updated.
3. Problem Management creates a work-around and noti-fies Incident Management for any further recurrences of the incident.
4. Problem Management includes the work-around for the known error database for reference by all the Service Support functions.
5. Problem Management identifies the root cause and a solution for the root cause.
6. Problem Management creates and submits an RFC to implement the solution.
7. The change is accepted and is processed through the Change Management process.
8. Change Management may forward the RFC to Release Management for the deployment of the change across the infrastructure, matching the RFC criteria.
9. Incident and Problem Management are notified when the change is successfully implemented.
10. Incident Management ensures that no new incidents appear because of the change.
The more integrated these processes are the better the level of service to the customer (when processes are automated, service levels improve greatly). The cross-func-tional integration is not just linear; there is a bidireccross-func-tional flow between the processes. In fact, one of the main measures for ITIL process maturity is the amount of
Service Support Service Delivery
Incident Management
> Automatically populates records
> Provides status of configuration items
> Provides urgency data for priorities
> Provides impact data for priorities
> Provides escalation data
Service Level Management
> All SLA components must be in CMDB
> SLAs can be referenced from CMDB
> Provides reference point for underpinning contracts
> Shows customer ownership
> CMDB is a vital component for the Service Improvement Program
Problem Management
> Automatically populates problem records
> Provides status of configuration items
> Provides risk analysis data for priorities
> Provides ownership data
> Provides data for proactive problem analysis
Capacity Management
> Each CI is a potential Capacity Management candidate
> CMDB provides resources for capacity modelling
> Shows related CIs in a capacity grouping
> Provides vital risk-analysis data
> CMDB reduces time-solving capacity related to incidents and problems
Change Management
> Shows CIs that are in the Change Management process
> Provides risk-analysis data
> Shows which other components could be affected by a change
> Provides feedback data about customers for changes
> Reflects the new status immediately after a change
Availability Management > Provides vital business impact data
> Availability Management is to be applied to all CIs in CMDB
> Shows related components in an Availability string
> Provides risk-analysis data
> Helps to isolate which CIs are the root cause of availability failures
Release Management > Tracks rollout status
> Keeps version details for software
> Enables planning vital data for rollouts
> Provides feedback data about customers for rollouts
> Provides data for financial impact of Releases
Financial Management
> Shows which CIs are used for each service provided to the customers
> Provides chargeback components
> Provides important governance information
> Provides a vital source for inventory and asset audit
> Important tool for financial calculations (e.g., budgeting and forecasting)
Service Desk > Identifies CMDB errors
> Uses CMDB to record incidents
> Provides proactive notification to the users
> Provides feedback to customers about CMDB changes
> Assists Configuration Management with CMDB audit
Continuity Management > Baselines provide vital recovery data
> Changes in CI status could mean changes in Continuity requirements
> Identifies any potential continuity outages
> Provides feedback data to customers during outages
> Shows status of CIs as they become active after an outage
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cross-functional integration that exists between the ITIL processes and the business processes, as illustrated in Table 2.
In Table 2, notice how Levels 3, 4, and 5 all show in-creased degrees of integration. It is also important to keep in mind that to achieve Business Service Manage-ment (BSM), the ITIL processes and the business processes must be integrated and that the CMDB plays a vital role in that integration.
For example, in IT reports, a gasoline pump that accepts credit cards is just another terminal and probably identified to IT by its model type; to the business owners, however, the pump is a revenue-generating opportunity and is likely known by a more functional name. Business managers need reports and information using the functional names for devices (e.g., gas pump), rather than IT device names that they do not understand. This is where the CMDB can contribute some cross-functional integration with the busi-ness. For example, the CI for the device could contain two attributes—one with the IT name for the device (12 xyzabc devices failed yesterday) and the other with the business name (12 gas pumps failed yesterday).
The CMDB is vital for cross-functional integration and is also a vital resource for ensuring the successful implemen-tation of ITIL Service Management. Of course, you can still implement some of ITIL and achieve a reasonable level of success without a CMDB, but the key word is “reasonable.”
For example, you can implement Incident Management without a CMDB, but how would you automatically popu-late incident records? How would you identify a priority without knowing the impact and urgency of the incident? How would you become proactive and notify customers affected by an incident? A CMDB not only provides the data for these activities, but with quality technology can also perform all of these activities dynamically.
Of course, you can get system-led benefits without a CMDB — but to gain maximum advantage, a CMDB is critical. The following list provides ten key benefits for implementing ITIL Service Management.
1. Improved quality of service and more reliable business
support – How can you improve the quality of service if you do not have the components of that service clearly defined? A CMDB provides the configuration for each service and the resulting foundation for improving the quality of service.
2. IT service continuity procedures provide more focus, more confidence in the ability to follow them when required – Imagine if a remote office of 200 work-stations burned down. How would you know the technology that was in that office and how it was con-figured? Without that information, how could the office be rebuilt or reinstated? A CMDB provides both the technology details and the configuration details for all locations. That information can be available with-in seconds and provides an immediate blueprwith-int for reconstruction.
3. Clearer view of current IT capability – To be able to provide a clear view of IT capability you must know the status of the entire IT infrastructure. One of the roles of the CMDB is to maintain the status of all in-frastructure items, CIs, which have upcoming changes. 4. Better information about current services (and possibly
about changes that would bring additional benefits) – Within each CMDB, each CI should have an attribute, or attributes, describing which service, or services, to which it relates.
5. Greater flexibility for the business through improved understanding of IT support – By having control of your resources, the more information you have the more flexible you can be. If you know all of the com-ponents that need to be considered for a potential change then you can ensure that those items meet the requirements of a change when it is implemented. For example, you may need to update your browser to meet changing needs. This is one of the reasons why the relationships within the CMDB are so important. Once you know what component you are going to change, the CMDB will show you all of the related
Level Function Description
0 Absence There is absolutely no evidence of any activities supporting the process.
1 Initiation
There are ad-hoc activities present, but we are not aware of how they relate to each other within a single process.
2 Awareness
We are aware of the process, but some activities are still incomplete or incon-sistent; there is no overall measuring or control.
3 Control
The process is well understood and implemented as a single process, but is not integrated with other processes.
4 Management
The process is now managed by incor-porating financial management, forward scheduling, trend analysis, and business relationships and is integrated with other IT systems and service processes.
5 Strategic
The process is fully integrated with busi-ness processes to provide a platform for strategic executives to make reliable busi-ness decisions using the power of their technology resources.
components. You can then review the related compo-nents to identify whether they will need any changes to ensure that they will function with the component that is to be changed.
6. Increased staff motivation and improved job satisfac-tion through better understanding of capability and better management of expectations – Despite popu-lar misconceptions, most people prefer working in a structured, organized and orderly environment. It is reassuring to know that virtually no changes will fail or create new incidents, so that the service desk staff can concentrate on the customer needs, rather than be distracted by entering incident ticket data. In addition, managers will be in a better position to understand the needs of their staff. The CMDB pro-vides a basis for accurate and readily available data that will contribute greatly to motivated staff and higher levels of job satisfaction.
7. Enhanced customer satisfaction as service providers
know and deliver what is expected of them – The CMDB provides the knowledge, while the rest of ITIL provides the delivery. However, delivery without knowledge is doomed to failure.
8. Increased flexibility and adaptability is likely to exist within the services – Great golfers, such as Tiger Woods, do not play a championship tournament with-out first having played the golf course while their caddies measure yardages and disseminate the haz-ards. Equipped with that knowledge, golfers can be adaptable to the demands of the tournament. 9. System-led benefits such as improvements in
secu-rity, accuracy, speed, and availability as required to meet the service levels – To improve a system you need to know all of the components of that system and where they are located. In a CMDB, the neces-sary components are easily found under the guise of CIs.
10. Improved cycle time for changes and greater success rate – Many changes require other components to be
changed to ensure a harmonious environment going forward. When upgrading to a software component, all software-recipient browsers may need to be on the most current release before the upgrades can be made. With a CMDB in place, you will know which users are to receive the software upgrade and their browser version. Without a CMDB in place, you lose cycle time identifying this information, and have a higher chance of failure because the older browser versions were not properly discovered.
Solutions that Enable
the Cornerstone
Over the years many organizations have attempted to cre-ate a CMDB; however, most have failed, simply because they tried to populate a single physical database with all the information from various related services within IT. Not only was duplication inevitable and data ownership difficult, but IT services were also encumbered with surplus data, most of which was needed by only a few functions and not the entire service.
Recognizing this issue and the absolute need for a CMDB in the delivery of IT services aligned with ITIL, BMC created the BMC Atrium CMDB. This is a federated CMDB linking the core-services data into a common single view of the common cross-service data. BMC Atrium provides a 360-degree view of the CIs, from any IT service perspective.
Figure 1 clearly shows that the automated population of the CMDB is through integration with the BMC Discovery Suite or with any acquired and deployed data collection tools, thus protecting your existing investment in technol-ogy. Based on predetermined rules, the unique (patented) Reconciliation Engine ensures that CI duplicates are re-moved and any extra data collected by one tool, and not another, are uniquely merged to provide a full picture of the configuration of the CIs. Links are then made to exter-nal databases such as enterprise resource planning (ERP)
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Remedy Asset Management
Life Cycle (schedules, POs) Contacts Costs Incidents Problems Tasks Change Requests Tasks Work Orders SLAs Measurement Records Service Impact Event Correlation Remedy Help Desk Remedy Change Management Remedy Service Level Agreement Remedy Impact Management
tools (SAP or Seibel, for example) and active directories, which also hold required data.
Finally, this reconciled data is made available to, and fed from, the IT services applications covering such tasks as Incident and Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, and Service Impact Management within the core Service Support functions. The BMC Atrium CMDB can be integrated to Event Management for ICT Infrastructure Management processes and so on, to be-come the single source of data for all the ITIL process.
The CMDB in conjunction with Atrium Reporting and Atrium View combines a reporting facility and viewing mechanism (see Figure 2) from an IT perspective and a business process perspective, highlighting the vital busi-ness functions (VBFs). This viewing mechanism provides a graphical interpretation of how the IT infrastructure is performing, and which VBFs are at risk, with a drill-down facility to check on actions being carried out to prevent or reduce outages. This enables the IT infrastructure to be managed from a business perspective and deliver true Business Service Management.
Business Service
Management
Activate Business with the power of IT and move from cri-sis management to value delivery with Business Service Management. The key to BSM is rapidly aligning IT resour-ces and proresour-cesses to directly support your most critical business objectives ensuring the stability of your vital business functions.
By viewing IT management through a business services lens, BMC Software has developed a plan for integrating all of its management disciplines into a cohesive strategy that allows IT and business services to be managed to-gether. This new approach is a response to both customer and industry analyst feedback. Both have noted that there is a movement toward a business-centric view of IT. This is not a divergence from past initiatives. BSM is the logical evolution of the BMC Software management strategy and builds on the solutions that BMC Software has delivered over the past 20 years, extending the promise of Assuring Business Availability. It is built around three essential com-ponents that are critical to achieving BSM: Service Impact Management, IT Service and Applications Management and IT Operations and Infrastructure Management.
Figure 3 (page 7) shows the BSM model, with the focus at the top on the Business operations, objectives and VBFs, integrating all the IT services functions to enable a holistic view of the services being delivery from a business per-spective. The CMDB is at the core of those IT services, feeding and being fed by all the relevant IT functions nec-essary to manage the IT infrastructure. BMC Software is committed to ensuring that this model is underpinned by the ITIL set of best practice processes and has both the Service Desk and the IT Service Management suite
appli-cations all verified by the PinkVerifyTM program. This means
that it has been objectively assessed according to the cri-teria specified by ITIL guidelines and certified by a qualified Pink Elephant IT Service Management consultant as meet-ing requirements to support the ITIL framework.
Figure 2. Need for Web services and data integration
Business/IT Manager
Atrium Reporting Atrium View
Conclusion
The question is no longer whether to align IT with the business — it is how. BMC Software offers proven ways to accelerate IT-business alignment and realize near-term return on investment (ROI) based on experience imple-menting more BSM solutions than any other company in the industry. To enable clients to move toward BSM in manageable steps, BMC Software designed Routes to
ValueTM. The Routes to Value are the integration of many
ITIL processes broken down into complementary, instantly beneficial functions.
The Routes to Value consist of: > Incident and Problem Management > Change and Configuration Management > Service Impact and Event Management > Service Level Management
> Infrastructure and Applications Management > Asset Management and Discovery
> Capacity Management and Provisioning > Identity Management
All of these Routes to Value are provided with and inte-grate into the BMC Atrium CMDB, ensuring from the start of the journey that the information is shared and the invest-ment is protected.
In summary, a CMDB will enable successful ITIL imple-mentation and provide the basis for information sharing to facilitate cross-functional process integration.
The CMDB is “A database that contains all relevant details of each Configuration Item and details of the important relationships between Configuration Items.” It need not be a single repository, but may be a federation of the source data to ensure the appropriate data owners own the data even though it is available to all IT services and functions.
The CMDB is vital to providing all the relevant informa-tion to the IT funcinforma-tions and allows that 360-degree view of the Configuration Items, regardless of which IT service accesses it.
The CMDB is the facilitator in aligning IT with the business. The CMDB will not only hold the information pertaining to the CIs, but it will enable the mapping of business services to those CIs, making it possible to manage and protect the vital business functions critical to the success of business continuity and revenues.
Finally, the CMDB is at the cornerstone of IT service man-agement, by facilitating IT and business alignment and, therefore, Business Service Management. For more infor-mation about BMC Software solutions that support ITIL, please visit www.bmc.com/itil.
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Figure 3. Business Service Management model
Service Impact Management CMDB Quality of Service Transactions Quality of Experience Service Level Management Service Desk Identity Management IT Business User Change Management Provisioning
Batch and Online Applications Performance and Availability
Capacity Management Discovery Asset Management Software Configuration Event Management Desktop Database Middleware Storage Mobile Network Mainframe and Distributed Servers BSM is a dynamic method for aligning IT to the business, and for ensuring that IT is able to support this goals
Underpinned with best practices, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
> The Business Perspective > ICT, Infrastructure Support > Service Support - Incident - Problem - Change - Configuration - Release > Service Delivery - Capacity - Availability - Financial - Continunity - Service Level
About BMC Software
BMC Software helps IT organizations drive greater business value through better management of technology. Our industry-leading Business Service Management solutions ensure that everything IT does is prioritized according to business impact, so IT can proactively address busi-ness requirements to lower costs, drive revenue and mitigate risk. BMC solutions share BMC Atrium™ technologies to enable IT to manage
