CSDM Tables

[SnowUser09]

Hi All,

I have questions about CSDM Tables -Business Application, Business Services, Application & Techinical Services and offering tables, 

1. As all these have logical CIs and need to create manually, so does manual import of the data from appl table is the only option to establish CSDM model.?

2. Once CSDM is established, then in real time scenarios, how can we maintain or keep these tables (business Application, Business Services, Application & Technical Services and offering) up to date, do we always need to update these tables manually once the CSDM model will be live? 

3. Is there any way to automate the process to keep these tables up to date as CIs generally keeps on updating and data in appl table will be updated on its own by Discovery.

4 How CSDM is different from Service Mapping as in both we are mapping CIs with each other. 

Thank you

[CMDB Whisperer]

The Application table (cmdb_ci_appl) is typically something that is updated primarily by Discovery, and its place in CSDM is as part of the Application Service, which is notably missing from your question.  I would typically not recommend importing Applications, unless you have a really good data source.  But you can have Application Services without Applications.  In other words, the degree of granularity of what infrastructure CIs you want to include within the Application Service is up to your company.  It should be at a fairly consistent level for all Application Services, but I have definitely seen some companies who choose based on the availability of accurate CI information to include only the Servers that lie within the Application Service.

One of the main things you should leverage to keep your CMDB up to date is the proper use of Change Management.  You should reinforce with your Change Management team and with your users that it is important to make sure that the CIs, attributes, and relationships in the CMDB should be updated as necessary to reflect the changes that are made during the change, especially any attributes or relationships that are being manually maintained.  Of course, using Discovery, Service Mapping, Service Graph Connectors, and other integrated CMDB data sources on an ongoing basis is important to making sure that any technical data is kept up to date.  Finally, using CMDB Data Manager to perform attestation on your overall services and using Data Certification for any business data that needs to be periodically verified will help you to keep this data accurate.

In Service Mapping, we are maintaining the attributes and relationships of CIs within the Application Service.  CSDM is a data modeling framework that focuses more on the logical relationships outside the Application Services.

[SnowUser09]

Thank you for your response and providing insights on CMDB , I understand that physical CIs can be discovered by Discovery and Service mapping can be used for relationship mapping. These can be maintained based on the new data populated automatically via Discovery.

But I want to understand, how can we keep Logical CIs & relationship in (Business Application, Business Services, Application & Technical Services and offering tables) up to date as these tables are populated Manually. So do we need to set up a governance model wherein we have to check these tables on regular intervals and update the data manually again. 

Thank you. 

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

Again, to be clear, Application doesn't belong in this list because it represents a real running process of an installed piece of software running on a specific server.  It is part of the Application Service.  That is the logical layer CSDM is concerned with, not Applications.

To answer your question I will point back to my previous response, that using Change Management, Data Certification, and CMDB Data Manager's Attestation policies are three methods of helping to keep your logical relationships up to date.  When you consider Business Applications and Business/Technical Services, there may be other processes that will naturally come into play such as those involved in Application Portfolio Management and Service Portfolio Management.

[SnowUser09]

Thank you for the information shared. It is really helpful in clearing doubts on CSDM.