The Changing Enterprise Operations
Organizations across the board are driven to provide more compelling customer experience. These customer experiences are powered by digital services. For instance, multi-cloud is an enterprise reality. According to IDC, more than 40% of the enterprises utilize multi-cloud strategy. Typically, enterprises use 3-5 clouds with a combination of private and public instances.
Source: The Journey Towards Optimized IT Operations. An IDC InfoBrief, Sponsored by ServiceNow
Similarly, serverless computing and PaaS capabilities that rely on containerized infrastructure are increasing. These capabilities are catalysts for the DevOps process. For instance, IDC sees that 48% of organizations with DevOps deployed will release new code monthly or weekly. These activities are powered by Kubernetes and other container orchestration engines on PaaS or public cloud environments. These initiatives are real and happening at a fast speed.
Emerging Challenges for IT Operations
This dynamic infrastructure adds new complexity for IT operations. You need to maintain full visibility of these environments for two reasons.
- This new infrastructure might create even more silos, since each stack works on a specific use case by itself.
- It’s not easy to monitor them since they’re not always deterministically “turned-on” or “turned-off”. For example, in a recent advisory panel, our customers shared that they are doing more data transactions across IT, Customer, HR, and Financial systems. These transactions contain workloads that might be running on traditional, virtualized infrastructure, but increasingly on containers as well. They must monitor the performance of these environments and keep track of configuration changes. They must also secure these environments.
The CMDB is a Foundation for AIOps
IT operations keep critical business services running that rely on these dynamic environments. To do so, configuration management is a crucial component. For example, often service disruptions are due to unplanned changes. When changes occur in container environments, IT operations need to be able to record them, so you can understand the impact on business services.
A healthy CMDB is a foundation for your AIOps strategy. You must start from a clean configuration data before reaping benefits from machine learning, analytics, and actionable intelligence. With healthy and service-aware CMDB, you have better capability to diagnose service issues, detect root cause problems quickly, and find resolution with reduced mean time to resolve. You can understand the complex relationships among infrastructure and define new sets of classes that need to be monitored. You can still start your AIOps journey in parallel, but having a sound CMDB foundation will speed your project.
New Set of Patterns Enable You to Keep Your CMDB Up-to-date with Dynamic Infrastructure
How to Get Started?
A high-quality CMDB is often on top of the IT organization’s Wishlist. Many CMDB projects either fail or delayed due to poor planning, governance, and executive buy-in (Read this best practice and track our Q&A series). We recommend that you take small steps and start with:
- Create a list of primary business objectives and use cases- Typically, incident and change management are critical use cases for configuration management project. But also think about digital / IT transformational projects where multi-cloud, containers, microservices, and serverless infrastructure might be considered.
- Create a cross-functional team -This team should have traditional configuration management capabilities but also be able to work across development, engineering, and line-of-business to understand dependency and metrics.
- Get executive buy-in –This is the most important point, your CMDB project won’t flourish without an executive blessing. You might want to make this person in charge of the Configuration Control Board.
Start with these three steps and learn from your peers in other enterprises on how to adjust your CMDB in the IT transformations journey. There are insightful sessions and opportunities coming at Knowledge19. Plan your time to take advantage of the Breakout sessions, Labs, CreatorCon, Best Practices, and a lot more…
Download this new eBookto learn how to create a healthy and service-aware CMDB.
