1. Don’t Overlook the Technology
Real lessons learned when designing and implementing a CMDB
John Morton – BMC Software Canada

2. BSM Maturity Curve
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3. Business Service Management
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4. CMDB Improves Business-IT Alignment
BMC: Shared views of technology-business relationships
Process, technology, and data silos
Prevents collaboration using common information about how technology supports the business
Brings IT processes and technology management together
BMC is launching second-generation technology at the Business-aware Foundation level
Technology included (on slide)
Customer Pain at Foundation Level
IT disciplines separated and unable to see how their decisions and actions affect the larger IT
and business environment
IT remains largely focused on technology issues rather than business objectives
IT is unable to effectively coordinate its many disciplines from a business perspective
As a Result:
IT is more apt to inadvertently disrupt the business when making changes since many complex
dependencies are hidden
IT cannot accurately scope the resource required to rollout changes
There are more severe business disruptions
BMC Solution – Overall Value to customer (on slide)
Now: More accurate, pervasive and business-aware views of how technology supports the business
Bring more silos of data into BSM view
Bring more business context to more IT specialties
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5. CMDB Factor – Service Delivery
Capacity Management
Enables each CI to be a potential Capacity Management candidate
Provides resources for capacity modelling
Shows related CIs in a capacity grouping
Provides vital risk-analysis data
Reduces time needed to resolve capacity-related incidents and problems
Availability Management
Provides vital business impact data
Applies Availability Management to all CIs in CMDB
Shows related components in an availability string
Provides risk-analysis data
Helps isolate which CIs are the root cause of availability failures
Financial Management
Shows which CIs are used for each service provided to customers
Provides chargeback components
Provides important governance information
Provides a vital source for inventory/asset audit
Serves as an important tool for financial calculations — e.g., budgets and forecasting
Service Level Management
Requires all service level agreement (SLA) components to be entered
Allows referencing of SLAs
Provides reference point for underpinning contracts
Shows customer ownership
Serves as a vital component for the Service Improvement Program
Business Continuity Management
Provides baselines that include vital recovery data
Indicates how change in CI status could mean changes in continuity requirements such as when a low-priority system becomes higher priority due to a change of system functionality
Identifies potential continuity outages
Provides feedback data to customers during outages
Shows status of CIs as they become active after an outage
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6. CMDB Factor – Service Support
Problem Management
Populates problem records automatically
Provides status of configuration items
Offers risk-analysis data for priorities
Provides ownership data
Presents data for proactive problem analysis
Release Management
Tracks rollout status
Keeps version details for software
Verifies tested configurations
Provides detailed information to ensure successful release
Provides data for financial impact of releases
Incident Management
Populates records automatically
Provides status of configuration items
Provides urgency data for priorities
Presents impact data for priorities
Provides escalation data
Change Management
Shows CIs that are in the change management process
Provides risk-analysis data
Shows which other components could be affected by a change
Enables communication to users related to a pending change
Reflects the new status immediately after a change
Service Desk
Identify missing configuration items
Populate records automatically when the Service Desk records incidents
Provide proactive notifications to users
Provide feedback to customers about CMDB changes
Assist configuration management with CMDB audit
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7. 5 Stages of CMDB Implementation
Stage 1: Assemble the project team and define the project
Stage 2: Define requirements
Stage 3: Finalize plan and select technology
Stage 4: Construct and maintain your CMDB
Stage 5: Communicating ongoing value and driving continuous improvement
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8. Step-by-Step CMDB Flow
6. Review and identify Governance requirements
10. Define Service Catalogue CMDB requirements
14. Define Configuration Item attributes
15. Design IT Model Blueprint
16. Select technologies for your CMDB
20. Select tool to automate CMDB population
7. Review and select supporting best practices
21. Populate your CMDB
17. Finalize the scope and plan the expansion
19. Construct your CMDB
8. Identify and address potential problems
9. Identify asset and inventory requirements
11. Define requirements for other processes
12. Defining Configuration Item level – IT Service Model
22. Create CI Lifecycle management process
23. Build supporting processes
24. Train the CMDB Team
25. Identify and install metrics
13. Define Configuration Item relationships
18. Calculate and present ROI
26. Create a continuous service improvement program
3. Review and agree CMDB goals and mission statement
4. Review, define and communicate the expected benefits
5. Build a business case
1. Identify project team members, define roles and responsibilities
2. Obtain CMDB knowledge
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9. BMC Atrium CMDB Unifying Decision Making Across IT Processes
Overview slide of CMDB. It’s all about unifying IT processes together for better decision making in context of the business.
Heart of BSM.
Key enabler for all IT processes and BMC solutions
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10. Check out this Ecosystem
Many BMC products are now BMC Atrium Activated
No other vendor has this level of out of the box integration
BMC Remedy Asset Management
BMC Remedy Service Desk
BMC Remedy Change Management
BMC Service Level Management
BMC Service Impact Manager
BMC Performance Manager
BMC Mainview
BMC SW Configuration Mgmt
BMC Control-M
CMDB
This is where we want to bring out the fact that this is:
More than a warmed over AM, Discovery or HD database
Instead, this is a purpose built product whose components will be discussed in more detail in a subsequent section
This application is already integrated to 9 different software solutions as part of our overall vision of making it an enabler of BSM. No one else can really say this.
We may be asked, but are not advertising, that this is not being offered as a stand alone at this time. If you are, the best answer is to say that it is only available with apps right now, a decision that is consistent with our stated BSM strategies and the fact that most of the value is derived through the applications
Tripwire (Verification/Audit)**
Voyence (Network CCM)**
IDS Scheer
Oracle Databases
Microsoft SMS
Microsoft SQL Databases
BMC Foundation Discovery
BMC Configuration Discovery
BMC Topology Discovery
BMC Identity Discovery
** Partner Integration
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11. BMC Atrium CMDB 2.0 –Common Data Model (CDM)
Extend common data model to include:
Business processes
User identity and roles
Mainframes
Batch processes
Service oriented architectures
Common Data Model Extensions
Provides enhanced mechanisms that make it easier to configure/customize the CDM
Ease of data migration
Extension Packs
Used by specific data provider/consumer to extend the CDM in a controlled way
Used by BMC and Partner solutions
Situation: “Where do put my data?”
Customers had a hard time getting started with the Common Data Model (CDM) 1.0 and they didn’t know where to put their CI data from existing sources.
Too many classes
CDM 1.0: 120 CI Classes  CDM 2.0: 75 Classes
CDM 1.0: 60 relationship classes  CDM 2.0: 16 Classes
Classes names weren’t always obvious
Too many relationship types
What did we do different in 2.0?
Reduced the “clutter” in the data model
Leverage namespaces to partition the data model
Created the concept of “extension classes”
Benefits
Easier to use, customize and migrate data to/from the Atrium CMDB.
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12. BMC Atrium CMDB Common Data Model
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13. BMC Atrium CMDB 2.0 – Reconciliation Engine
Workflow Enabled Compare Activity
Manage change verification
Workflow to take specific actions based on compare results
Notify users
Create incident (unplanned change)
Reconciliation Sandbox
Supports overlay datasets
Controls how and when reconciled data gets moved into the production CMDB
Event driven reconciliation
Initiated reconciliation in ad hoc fashion via API
Reconciliation Activates
RE activities: copy, delete, purge datasets
COPY, DELETE and PURGE CI’s during RE jobs
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14. Federation of Data What is “Federation”?
Definition: Federation refers to a central repository holding Configuration Items and Relationships directly, while linking to other data in other sources
There are two types of data to federate:
Data you might choose to federate if you want to track it, but not track it as often or as vigorously as a CI’s key attributes (Extended Data)
Data referenced by a CI to provide additional content related to the functionality of the CI, but not part of the CI itself (Related Data)
Federation of Data:
Federation refers to a central repository holding some data directly, while linking to other data in other sources
From the library card catalog example, the CMDB is the Card Catalog, or directory service and the extended and related data are the shelves of books holding the related data.
There are two types of data to federate:
Data you might choose to federate if you want to track it, but not track it as often or as vigorously as a CI’s key attributes
AND: Data referenced by a CI to provide additional content on extended functionality to the CI, but not part of the CI itself
Example for data type 1:For example, the CMDB record for an employee might have a Skills attribute that contains a list of the employee’s skills, and a Department attribute that contains the employee’s department name. It might also be involved in a relationship with an HR data store where additional attributes, like Salary, that are not really important from a configuration perspective are stored.
Example for data type 2:For example, your CI records for software instances might have a License relationship containing the URL to an intranet page where the license is posted, or each CI record might have a Problem relationship that contains the information necessary to search a problem
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15. Federation Management
Configurable Product Registry
Easily configure federated data sources and how to access them from CMDB
Federated Data Linking
CMDB provides efficient methods for linking to external data
“Right click” launch to federated data directly from CI Relationship Viewer
Enabled “launch in context”
Link to federated data in context of how data relates to specific CI
Decrease cost and effort involved in maintaining point-to-point integrations between more IT processes technology management disciplines by using the CMDB as a single point of reference for more infrastructure components, users, business processes and their dependencies
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16. BMC Atrium CMDB’s Federated Approach
Scalable approach to implementing a CMDB
Leverage existing technologies already in place
Provides single place to access all information about CI’s
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17. Audience-based service visualization in the CMDB
Service Model View
Service Model Editor
Service Impact View
Service Impact Manager
IT Process User View
CI Viewer
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18. BMC® Atrium CMDB logically unifies asset and CI data across tools and processes
ITSM Suite
Reconciled data set
BMC IT Discovery
Suite
Change &
Configuration
Management
3rd Party
BMC
data set
CCM
3rd Party
Infrastructure
Correlated Event Mgt
And so the other part of the big picture is the CMDB. So where does all this discovery data go, and how is it accessed for asset lifecycle management? Information returned by discovery tools is stored and modeled in a Configuration Management Database, or CMDB. There’s a lot of marketing spin out there about what a CMDB actually is, so let’s walk briefly through what ours is, what it isn’t, and why it’s important.
The BMC CMDB is an intelligent repository for data that creates and dynamically maintains a logical model of your IT environment. It includes an asset repository, but is much, much more than that. The BMC CMDB is a foundation component of Business Services Management shared by multiple BMC tools, as well as third-party tools. It’s a way to get all your various creators of IT environment data (such as discovery tools) as well as consumers of data (such as management tools) to represent assets, configurations and relationships in a common language. The CMDB is important because it allows you to work with a consistent model of your IT environment across interrelated IT management processes, even if you are using different tools to automate those processes.
So let’s talk about what comprises the BMC CMDB.
First, the CMDB contains a common data model extended from industry standards such as the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF). It not only includes pre-built data structures for more than 180 different classes of asset and Configuration Items, it also includes 80 different types of relationships between CIs. And it can store not only a current state of an asset or CI, but also it’s previous state and relationships, a future target state and relationships. And you can extend and modify the data model to meet your unique needs.
Second, there is out-of-the-box integration to BMC discovery tools as well as Microsoft SMS.
Third, the BMC CMDB includes an open API to leverage your existing investments and to enable partner products, including third-party discovery tools, to write to and access CMDB data. When data comes in from the discovery tools, it’s held in a staging area in separate datasets-- until it is reconciled.
This leads to a fourth and very important service available for the CMDB: the Reconciliation Engine. The Reconciliation Engine uses business rules to sort through and analyze different datasets created by different discovery tools, and reconcile them into reliable production data. For example, you can specify that for the available disk space in a server, always trust Marimba Configuration Discovery over Microsoft SMS. Reconciliation rules for BMC discovery tools will be provided out of the box, but we also make it easy for you to add and customize rules so you can incrementally tune and then fine tune the engine to your unique needs and your own discovery tools. In cases where data can’t be automatically reconciled, the Reconciliation Engine provides workflow to make manual reconciliation faster and easier. You may decide to run discovery and reconciliation once a month, once a week, once a day—whatever works best for you, depending largely on the level of accuracy you need at that point in your IT asset management program.
Once you have performed reconciliation you now have a reliable production dataset that can be used for asset management. The CMDB is not only integrated with Remedy Asset Management, it is the native data model for these applications. In fact, all Remedy ITSM applications were just re-architected in version 6.0 available so the CMDB is an inseparable part of Remedy Asset Management, Remedy Change Management and Remedy Help Desk.
The CMDB is also integrated as part of the Service Impact Management RTV where the CMDB’s picture of the IT environment and its inter-dependencies is used to interpret the significance of events in your infrastructure, and how these events may be impacting or about to impact your business services
What the CMDB is NOT:
It’s not a professional services engagement. The CMDB is real, out-of-the-box, and part of several BMC products, including all Remedy ITSM applications. It will be generally available early next quarter, and is part of our early access program for select customers happening this November.
It’s not something that forces you to have a massive database or a massive data integration project. First, you can federate multiple BMC CMDBs, or have a single instance use multiple physical databases. The BMC CMDB architecture also enables you to incorporate data from external data stores and present it as part of a single, logical CMDB. So if you have software and data repositories that have useful data and are working for you today as a source of truth, great. Keep them there. You might have personnel or asset data maintained by your ERP system, or in your active directory system, or perhaps another asset management system. You may have geographies or business units that need to be accountable for maintaining IT data for their own areas. Or you have have specialists such as network managers using specialized tools to maintain data unique to their needs but with overlaps into what you need to manage from an asset standpoint. You can see this data through a database of objects with pointers to these master data sources.
Object
Pointers
(logical)
ERP
Active Directory
Geos, BUs
CI Type
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19. Configuration Item Level
The degree of detail selected to describe a unique entity
Multiple
CIs?
Single
CI?
Too much granularity = to difficult to maintain
Too little granularity = low usage levels
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20. Final scoping objective
The scope of the Infrastructure to be covered by the CMDB
The range of responsibility covered by Configuration Management as defined by the Infrastructure:
Hardware
Software
Telecommunications
People
Documentation
Etc.
There limiting factors that may affect the final scoping of your CMDB typically these will include:
Cost / Time
Practicality
Business Practices
Ownership/ Geography
IT structure
Etc.
Only you can determine your CMDB final scoping
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21. Importance of Automated Discovery
Discovery is critical to the success of any CMDB implementation:
Complexity of the infrastructure environment
Infrastructure heterogeneity
Business functions and services are no longer monolithic applications hosted on single server
“The only constant about IT assets is change.  Configurations, users, relationships to multiple business services, even ownership of IT assets can change on a daily basis in an enterprise making it impossible to manually update and maintain the level of accuracy needed of a CMDB that is central to all IT processes.  Maintaining the accuracy of the CMDB requires discovery techniques that are comprehensive and automated.”
*CMDB: Building the Fountain of Truth through Automated Discovery, 2006 Ptak, Noel & Associates
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22. BMC® Discovery – What it does
Automated Discovery: The first step toward BSM Success
Foundation
Discovery
Configuration
Topology
Identity
Foundation
Assets: What is the accurate inventory of deployed assets?
Configuration
Asset Configurations: What are their components and settings?
Identity
Users: Who is using these resources?
Topology
Relationships: What are their interdependencies?
A robust solution that address a broad spectrum of discovery needs for BSM initiatives.
Populates & maintains the Atrium CMDB.
Provides a unique offering for application relationship mapping – automatically discovers components & relationships of packaged enterprise applications as well as custom-built or “unknown” applications
A discovery solution that can be implemented in a heterogeneous IT environment and is not constrained to a single vendor’s computing systems
Providing data to enable real-time business service modeling, accurate data to support change execution, dependency data for quicker problem resolution, and more.
BMC is the only vendor that brings to bear all levels of discovery to support a wide-range of business service management solutions.
Topology
Discovery
Foundation
Discovery
Identity
Discovery
Configuration
Discovery
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23. Visibility of the Relationships
Viewed in the Service Model
End-to-end Visibility
End users
Linked to business processes
Linked to application systems
Linked to supporting infrastructure
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24. Acknowledgements Malcolm Fry Ken Turbitt
Maria Ritchie, Michael Oas and Angie Massicotte
David Chiu
Jeanne Morian
Michael Nicoletti
And Elaine Korn and Kurt Milne
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25. Thank You Q&A