subject: CMDB ITIL - the concepts [print this page] CMDB ITIL - the concepts CMDB ITIL - the concepts
Many veterans in the IT field will draw blank at the reference of CMDB and many organizations would deliberately stay away from IT service management applications because they think it is not an meaningful area to commit funds or resources for.The CMDB is a configuration management respository or database (CMDB) for enterprise IT organizations to document and store the business service definitions and associated infrastructure relationships.
For any orgnaization, IT assets,service elements and infrastructural objetcs keep on piling up day by day. A configuration management database enables the organization to manage, monitor, structure and preserve the IT assets in a professional way. The CMDB is conceptually referenced in tandem with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and it is considered an integral part of the ITIL framework.
The ITSM pundit refers to CMDB as the foundation for the 'shared single version of truth' to support business service management, IT Service Management, change management, and asset management initiatives. These initiatives help align IT efforts with business requirements and run IT operations more efficiently and effectively. The basic element of a CMDB is the so-called CI (Configuration Item), which describes the properties of any hardware, software as well as business process. Each CI is an instance of a CIT (Configuration Item Type), comparable to an object in object-oriented programming, which is an instance of a class. On the basis of the defined inheritances and interdependencies, the system and business landscape of an enterprise can be designed. Every single CI can be dependent on other CIs. This enables systems to be described very flexibly. Thus, using a CMDB, it is also possible to define systems according to the ITIL-Standard. The CMDB records configuration items (CI) and details about the important attributes and relationships between CIs. Configuration managers usually describe CIs using three configurable attributes: Technical, Ownership and Relationship. A key success factor in implementing a CMDB is the ability to automatically discover information about the CIs (auto-discovery) and track changes as they happen. CMDBs contain metadata, and thus the concept overlaps with that of a metadata repository, which are both used in running large IT organizations. Configuration management addresses how the data is to be kept up to date, which has historically been a weakness of metadata repositories. Behind a successful implementation of CMDB, according to the ITIL principles, the core requirement is a robust data model. The data model's built-in support for automatically modeling the complex relationships between CI elements, is the primary success factor for a CBDB ITIL.
In many advanced ITSM applications, this data model is populated automatically and maintained through a Discovery tool/ Dependency Mapping software. Needless to emphasize, the efficacy of a CMDB lies, in a great measure, how it can manage the Change Management and Change tracking processes and address the associated reporting needs. In other words, a well implemented CMDB ITIL, enables a single version of the truth to improve collaboration among IT and business teams. It helps proactive analysis of change and service impact to minimize business risk. For a brief exposition to the CMDB and ITIL framework, visit the blog CMDB ITIL.
