Setup CMDB
Introduction
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a centralized repository that stores information on all significant entities of your IT environment. These entities, termed as Configuration Items (CIs), constitute hardware, software applications, documents, business services and people that are part of your IT system.
CMDB is designed to support a vast and critical IT infrastructure and understand the relationships between IT components.
Not all Assets, Users, and Services are CIs, but only those that are critical to your IT environment are considered the CIs.
CMDB is a customer-based module. Each CI can be associated only with one customer.
Terminologies
- Configuration Item (CI): CIs are the fundamental block of CMDB and critical resources of your organization. They can be categorized under different CI types, and CI to CI relationships can be defined. Example: Business Service, Marketing Service, and Customer Service.
- Configuration Item (CI) Type: Categorizes a group of CIs with similar properties. The CI types contain fields specific to all CIs under that type. Example: Assets, Data Center, Storage Device, Storage, Computer, Department, People, etc.
- Relationship type: Defines the nature of the relationship between different CIs and CI types. A relationship type comprises a name and its inverse name. Example: Consider a relationship where the 'Tomcat server is Hosted In Linux Server'. This can also be stated that the 'Linux Server Hosts the Tomcat Server'. Here, 'Hosted In' is the direct relationship type and 'Hosts' is the inverse relationship type.
- CI type to CI type relationship: These relationships, defined by SDCMDBAdmin, are the suggested relationships between CI types. The SDCMDBAdmin decides the relationship type, the target CI type, and the cardinality.
- CI to CI relationship: Defines how one CI is connected to another CI. CI to CI relationships can be either custom or suggested.
- Relationship Map: Presents a visual representation of the dependencies between different CIs and the system flow. The relationship map can be used to analyze the impact of a change on any CI. The relationship map represents the relationships between only the CIs and not the CI types.
How Does CMDB Work?
CIs within the CMDB are classified under different CI Types. Each CI type within the CMDB is represented with:
- Fields: Data elements that describe the characteristics of CIs under a CI Type.
- Relationships: The link between two CIs that identifies the dependency or connection between them.
Example: Consider the CI types 'Web Server', 'Database Server', and 'File Server' that inherit the CI Type 'Server'. They might comprise fields such as 'Model', 'Service Tag', 'Processor Name', etc and might be connected by relationships such as 'Managed By', 'Runs on', etc.
To setup CMDB, the administrator must first set up the following configurations under Setup > Customization > CMDB:
To view your CIs, go to the CMDB tab. On the CMDB page, the left navigation pane displays the business views and the hierarchy of all available CI types. The canvas in the middle displays the available business views and the CIs under the selected CI type.
Impact of CMDB in an Organization
- CMDB serves as the core for modern IT operations and allows organizations to manage all of their critical IT components at one place.
- CMDB enhances service management activities such as incident management, change management, and problem management.
- You can analyze the business impact of a CI, use relationship maps to perform impact analysis before implementing a change, and conduct a Root Cause Analysis of an incident.
- You can track of all pending requests, changes, etc raised for the CIs.
- CMDB is a vital tool for decision-making, thereby improving cost, quality, and performance of the IT services offered by the organization.
Asset management VS CMDB
Asset management is different from the configuration management database (CMDB). An asset database simply contains a list of assets, whereas the CMDB is designed to support a vast and critical IT infrastructure and understand relationships between the components.
Asset Management | Configuration Management (CMDB) |
Assets are self-contained, autonomous entities that provide intrinsic financial value to the organization. | CMDB is a database that holds assets, data centers, storage devices, etc, which are critical to the organization. |
It deals with financial & lifecycle aspects of assets. | It deals with Configuration Items (CIs) and their relationships. |
The main users are people who are in-charge of inventory and the life cycle of assets. | The main users are service providers, who use this as a decision-making tool to provide improvements to the existing IT services. |
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