What is a configuration management database (CMDB)?

Integration of dashboards with CI metrics and analytics makes it easy to track the health of data, the impact of changes, patterns that lead to incidents or problems, and the health of the CIs. It gives the operations team real-time insights into the previous incident, problem or change related to a CI, which significantly reduces the time it takes to remediate an issue.

Access controls provide the ability to give access levels to different individuals or teams as needed, and trace any changes back to their source in the event of incidents or questions.

You’ll get detailed records for visibility purposes, which will help with audits. Insights into records include the state of CIs, historical changes, checks and balances, and incidents.

This is supported across three different types of method: integrations, discovery tools, and manual input, which all scan IP addresses within an organisation’s network to find software and hardware information. This process creates an inventory of all assets and devices within a company, including cloud resources.

Support for federated data sets includes reconciliation and normalisation of CIs and their relevant data.

A physical representation of relationships and dependencies related to an IT service.

Despite the obvious advantages of CMDBs, many organisations fail to generate value from their CMDB solutions. The reasons for this include: the manual processes used to build the CMDB, and the lack of people and processes in place to identify the critical data that should be moved into the CMDB or the automated tools to ensure that the data is put in the right place in the CMDB. However, this does not mean that the technology itself is flawed; by identifying the factors at play, it is possible to prepare for and prevent issues that might hamper CMDB effectiveness.

It can be difficult to maintain the accuracy of a CMDB—some of these difficulties include discovery tools not running frequently enough, an absence of automation protocols, or too much reliance on data input. By focusing on and optimising discovery within your CMDB, you will improve accuracy.

While a CMDB is a centralised place to view data, this does not necessarily mean that all asset data needs to live exclusively in the CMDB. A best practice is to take data from other tools so that the most relevant tool is used to support each case.

While a CMDB does act as a centralised repository for IT asset information, there can sometimes be too many sources of data that are feeding into the CMDB. This can create confusion and muddled data that may be difficult to categorise.

Some organisations function under the perception that CMDBs are for mapping legacy infrastructure and software rather than the new stack of cloud and software infrastructure. It’s important to not let the conversation around semantics prevent you from tracking the value of your CIs in a tool that provides a wide view of your technical ecosystems.

Some companies treat their CMDBs as the singular source of truth, and this can lead to organisations trying to combine all of their data into that location without considering use cases and what is relevant to their needs. A CMDB should contain only useful and focused data that supports processes. Ensure that it defines value, objective, owner, and ways to update all of the data.

Team commitment is one of the most important factors in the integration and use of new technologies and processes, and whether or not they are successful. If your organisation and the people involved are not fully committed to the success of your CMDB solution, then it likely will not succeed.

It’s crucial to choose the right tool if you want to avoid failure. Some CMDB tools are simply asset repositories that are fixed on legacy infrastructure discovery tools with a slow reaction to change. The best CMDB tools are those that are able to pivot quickly, and that account for new types of assets.

Each organisation has different use cases and goals with CMDBs, and that should determine the extent of their setup.

This includes application software, containers, virtual machines, databases, operation systems, hardware, ports, business services, technical services, and networks.

These are users, organisations, locations, documents, customers, and service agreements.