I have a case where we will not be considering Enterprise Discovery for a while, and have done a CMDB manual load-in of our desktop fleet. I was just wondering if you would have any pointers on the "poor mans" CMDB? What Relationships would be considered as beneficial without the overhead of constantly juggling spreadsheets?
One kind of relationship stands out: those between business services and the IT assets they depend on.
For example, suppose your organization has a moderately elaborate Exchange email infrastructure. You might have 5 or 6 Exchange servers scattered around the globe, perhaps clustered. You may have some OWA front-end servers, some routers, and possibly even dedicated connectivity of some kind. You might also have associated BlackBerry enterprise servers, messaging interconnects (for legacy mainframes, Notes, etc.). Then there's the backup and recovery system, and who knows what else. By the time you tote it all up, it's a lot of stuff!
But from the perspective of the services IT delivers to the organization, that whole mess is really just one business service: messaging. You'd really like to have the business service represented in the CMDB, along with the relationships that show all that infrastructure that it depends on. The starting point is simply to create an entry in your CMDB for the business service. In the example at right, I've created a Messaging business service, by navigating to Configuration → Business Services and clicking New. Adding the relationships is very simple: just click on the "+" button on the Business Service form (highlighted in orange at right).
When you do that, you'll get a screen like the one at left. I chose Depends on for the relationship type (because my Messaging business service depends on other assets), and then I set the filter below to choose from my Windows servers. Once I got my pathetic list of servers up, I chose the one that is an Exchange server. Then I clicked OK, and the relationship was created. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary to build all the relationships you want to show.
In the screenshot at right you can see the one relationship I added. If I were doing this for real in the example I gave above, I might end up with a couple dozen relationships to various other CIs. Without Discovery, I'd probably just make relationships to servers and other business services, much as I did in the example. With Discovery, I'd do something quite different: I build relationships primarily to applications (Exchange itself, the BlackBerry server, etc.), because Discovery will construct all the other dependencies for me. For example, Discovery will know what server the BlackBerry application runs on, and it will know what Exchange server it uses...
