CMDB: The Beating Heart of IT Management
May 09, 2013
Suvish Viswanathan
Share this

If you’ve followed my recent articles for APMdigest — on why you need application-aware network performance management (AA-NPM) tools a few weeks ago and, more recently, on why you need to integrate IT operations management and service management — perhaps you’ve already guessed where I’m heading. The more effectively we can integrate management tools at every level and the more effectively we can manage the delivery of IT as a service to our constituents, the more value we add to the enterprise and its mission.

At the same time, the further we enlarge those circles to encompass and integrate infrastructures that were previously disconnected, the greater the number of elements we need to incorporate, monitor and manage. It’s not just servers and storage systems — it’s everything from switches and routers to firewall appliances, to passive devices like printers, power and cooling systems, and more. It’s the mouse and the keyboard attached to each PC in the business; it’s the cell phone and the tablet that walked in — BYOD! — with an employee just this morning.

And we haven’t even touched on software or actual business processes.

I don’t think I need to go on; you know how complex and chaotic the broader infrastructure can become. We need something that ties all these disparate pieces together, a focal point that connects all these different physical and virtual assets and that fundamentally understands how all the different pieces of the IT puzzle fit together.

That’s where the configuration management database (CMDB) fits in. It’s not simply one more tool on par with every other tool in the world of IT management — that CMDB is dead! In today’s demanding environment, CMDB is the beating heart of a dynamic IT infrastructure, the element that connects all the assets involved in the delivery of everything from business services to the end-user experience. It must be understood as such — and deployed as such — for IT to deliver the higher levels of service it strives to deliver.

The Single Source of Truth

During the Gartner I&O summit last summer, an IT director from a large insurance company said to me, “We have so many tools doing multiple jobs in managing the IT infrastructure that I have lost the idea of a single version of truth.”

It’s easy to understand how this gentleman could say this: IT in a large company involves thousands — if not millions — of assets and processes interacting at once. If only small portions of that broader IT infrastructure are integrated then it is impossible to gain access to a single source of truth. There are simply too many barriers that stand in the way.

With a properly built and fully populated CMDB, though, those barriers begin to fall down. Not only would such a CMDB recognize all the IT and non-IT assets, all the processes and all the SLAs within the enterprise, it would recognize the relationships between these assets, processes and more. Put another way, if you looked up a physical asset in the CMDB as I’m describing it, not only would you learn about its physical characteristics — who manufactured it and when, what’s inside of it, how it’s licensed and more — you would also learn what role it plays in the delivery of any business service that touches it. You could see what flags it raised as well as when and where it exceeded or missed performance marks identified by the QoS levels and SLAs attached to services.

Moreover, you would see how that asset is connected to other assets within both the enterprise and the service delivery environment — and begin to understand how a change in the performance of one asset ripples through to other assets to affect the performance of an entire service. That level of visibility and insight is required for you to achieve real, effective change management in your organization.

In short, a CMDB that is properly designed and fully populated with information about the assets, processes, relationships and dependencies can be the single source of information from which actionable insights can arise about the state of the broad service delivery environment. And with that information, you can respond appropriately to deliver the best possible service to your clients.

Not There … Yet

So, one has to ask: If a CMDB is this great, why are we still having problems integrating these complex service delivery infrastructures? The simple answer is that few CMDB implementations are mature enough to provide the right balance of integration, support, ease of deployment, and cost-justification.

Many CMDB offerings are still vendor-specific, so they will only discover the assets that have been built by (or are supported by) a given vendor. Other CMDB implementations are more vendor-neutral but lack the tools to discover all the different types of assets that may be in use in a given environment. They may be able to detect a wide range of servers and network appliances, for example, but perhaps they cannot see the power and cooling systems installed in the server racks themselves. Still others require a prohibitive investment of time to configure and populate. Many are hugely expensive to acquire and maintain.

But this will change. Vendors may need to be pushed, but as IT organizations set higher expectations of vendor CMDB offerings — because they understand the critical role that a CMDB can play in integrating all aspects of a well-managed service delivery environment — then vendor offerings will evolve to overcome the issues described above. You should expect — even demand — more than you can get today: more integration, more federation, more robust relationship mapping between assets, better tools for visualizing actionable information, more extensive reporting and more insightful dashboards.

As for the integrated AA-NPM tools and integrated operational and service management tools that we talked about at the beginning of this series? They will integrate with the CMDB to provide even greater insights into activities, trends and anomalies in the service delivery network. With these deep connections into the CMDB itself, you will be able to use these tools to deliver the highest levels of service both to end users and the clients whose applications you support.

ABOUT Suvish Viswanathan

Suvish Viswanathan is the senior analyst, Unified IT, at ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp.

Share this

The Latest

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...

March 14, 2024

The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...

March 13, 2024

In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...

March 12, 2024

eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...

March 11, 2024

Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...

March 07, 2024
In this digital era, consumers prefer a seamless user experience, and here, the significance of performance testing cannot be overstated. Application performance testing is essential in ensuring that your software products, websites, or other related systems operate seamlessly under varying conditions. However, the cost of poor performance extends beyond technical glitches and slow load times; it can directly affect customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Understand the tangible and intangible consequences of poor application performance and how it can affect your business ...
March 06, 2024

Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...

March 05, 2024

Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...

March 04, 2024

This year's Super Bowl drew in viewership of nearly 124 million viewers and made history as the most-watched live broadcast event since the 1969 moon landing. To support this spike in viewership, streaming companies like YouTube TV, Hulu and Paramount+ began preparing their IT infrastructure months in advance to ensure an exceptional viewer experience without outages or major interruptions. New Relic conducted a survey to understand the importance of a seamless viewing experience and the impact of outages during major streaming events such as the Super Bowl ...