There is still a belief among some people we have talked to that a CMDB, on its own, is basically a repository of configuration information related to all the components of an information system. It contains the details of the configuration items within an IT infrastructure. They believe that this collection of data into a central location is just "table stakes" for IT operators and may not have great value for people who are interested in the IT asset management of their company's services.
For a CMDB solution to be valuable to these IT asset managers, they would first need to accurately create service maps showing how business services play out from beginning to end across the application tier, as well as infrastructure tiers (network, database, storage, etc.).
Second, for there to be any actionable insight gained from the data within a CMDB, it would need to be easy to transform the configuration information into insights on the health of applications or business services in their entirety. The collection of configuration items and their relationships to one another and to the overall service would need to be maintained in real-time without the "drift" that normally impacts such data, due to the ever-changing environment in a typical data center. A sort of "trail of crumbs" approach, therefore, is needed in order to understand exactly which IT components are used in each business service and their relationships to others.
A common problem today is that some companies rely too much upon the good intentions of IT people and the depth of change management policies to avoid drift. ServiceWatch provides a solution by starting the discovery process with an easily understood user-accessed entry point to the business service. It then drills down surgically through the applications and supporting IT infrastructure, leveraging our patented algorithm which requires no agents and no specialized knowledge, automatically mapping and monitoring only those things that are relevant to that specific service. As a result, it maps services in minutes, and provides accurate, up-to-date application and service performance information — even in rapidly-changing IT environments and with negligible overhead.
Once integrated with existing monitoring and/or event management tools — or using ServiceWatch's native monitoring capabilities — the service model comes alive and presents incidents, events, problems, and changes to any component in context of the application or business service. This approach enhances your CMDB investment by making it "service-aware," providing increased value on your original investment with each incident or change that is managed more effectively.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework for IT service management that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ITIL has been adopted by most IT organizations and details the management procedures for several IT management functions, including incident, problem, configuration, change, and release management.
Incident management is an IT service management process with the goal of restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations after an IT incident occurs. Storing asset information in a CMDB may not be helpful during incident management activities; there must be accurate and up-to-date insight into how the information works together in the system. Some call it Service Dependency Mapping, others call it Service Modeling. We sometimes call it "topological analysis".
ServiceWatch's real-time modeling with top-down discovery technology automatically creates accurate topological maps that relate business services to IT applications and supporting infrastructure resulting in the following value:
1) Service Health Monitoring — IT operators have real-time visibility into the health of the data center
2) Problem Isolation & Root-Cause Analysis — The root cause wizard identifies critical events and eliminates derived clutter resulting in rapid problem isolation, improved root-cause analysis, and real-time insight into the business impact of incidents
3) Improved Change and Configuration Management Governance — Empowers the CAB (Change Advisory Board) to proactively identify the business impact of proposed changes, ensure notification of business owners, reactively validate to changes were made in accordance with the RFC (Request for Change), and eliminate drift
The CMDB is obviously much more than a repository of configuration information related to all the components of an information system. And can be made to be of even more value by delivering accurate and up-to-date configuration information fed via automated discovery.
Next… IT Health Monitoring and the End of Crying Wolf
