The Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) consists of Configuration Items (CIs) that include hardware, software, or documentation. Other records associated with CIs can include Incidents, Known Errors, Problems and other corporate data for example suppliers, contracts, locations, business units and procedures.
Hardware CIs typically consist of two types of data, information that has been collated electronically (using an Asset Discovery Tool) and other information that has been collated manually.
The electronically collated data, Asset data, consists of details obtained from an automated discovery tool such as RMS Aware. RMS Aware will discover IP based assets on a network and schedule audits to create or update data in the RMS CMDB. This data consists of details of the type of asset (PC, Server, Router, Printer etc.) and its attributes (Make, Model, CPU, Memory size/type/slots, installed software, disk space etc.).
The other data, Inventory data, is usually obtained from other reference sources or manually updated. This information will include details such as the supplier, maintenance contract, warranty details, configuration documentation and value.
Change Management records are associated to the CIs and can be directly referenced to view the CI's full change history.
Within the RMS CMDB both Asset and Inventory data can be viewed from a single CI Folder.. Inventory data is entered into the Details, Maintenance, Asset, Finance and Notes pages, examples are shown below.
|
Details Page Asset Page |
Maintenance Page Finance Page |
Notes Page;)
Relevant documents or URLs can be attached using the Links Page and can be ‘opened' directly from this link.
;)
Asset details can be viewed from one of two Inventory folder tabs, one providing a customised condensed view and the other providing lookup access to all ‘discovered data as shown below.
|
|
The RMS Configuration Management maintains the relationship between CIs based the simple philosophy of:
The diagram below serves as an example of how this could be configured. The important part is that this provides essential information to the Change Management Risk Assessment process and allows Incident Management to correctly classify the severity of issues.
;)
The above diagram shows that if Router2 fails then email, a print server and the link to Router3 will be unavailable. If, however, only Port0 on Router fails then only the SAP application will be unavailable.
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)