Configuration management database

Last updated

A configuration management database (CMDB) is an ITIL term for a database used by an organization to store information about hardware and software assets (commonly referred to as configuration items). It is useful to break down configuration items into logical layers. [1] This database acts as a data warehouse for the organization and also stores information regarding the relationships among its assets. [2] The CMDB provides a means of understanding the organization's critical assets and their relationships, such as information systems, upstream sources or dependencies of assets, and the downstream targets of assets. [3]

Contents

Purpose and benefits

The CMDB is a fundamental component of ITIL framework's Configuration Management process. CMDBs are used to keep track of the state of assets such as products, systems, software, facilities, people as they exist at specific points in time, and the relationship between all assets. A CMDB helps an organization understand the relationship between the components of a system and to track their configurations. The maintenance of this information allows for certain actions, such as the reconstruction of assets, to occur at any point in time. CMDBs can also be used for things like impact analysis, root cause analysis, or change management.

CMDB implementations often involve federation – the inclusion of data into the CMDB from other sources – such as asset management, in such a way that the source of the data retains control of the data. Federation is usually distinguished from ETL (extract, transform, load) solutions in which data is copied into the CMDB.

CMDBs can be used for many things, including but not limited to: business intelligence, software and hardware builds, inventory, [4] impact analysis for change management, [5] and incident management.

In the context of ITIL, the use of CMDBs is as part of infrastructure operations and support. The CMDB represents the authorized configuration of the significant components of the IT environment.

Contents

The CMDB contains and records data that are also called configuration items (CI). It also provides details about the important attributes of CIs and the relationships between them.

CI attributes and data

Attributes captured by a CMDB vary based on CI category, and can number up to the hundreds. Some examples include:

Because attributes are defined by metadata, CMDBs also contain metadata, and thus the concept overlaps with that of a metadata repository, which is also used to more effectively run IT organizations. Configuration management addresses how the data is to be kept up to date. This has historically been a weakness of metadata repositories.

Relationships between CIs

At a minimum, relationships are often composed of a Source CI that is related to a Target CI. In the case of more advanced relationships, such as semantic relationships, it is desirable to have a descriptor between the Source CI and Target CI that helps provide context. For example, "database" is related as a "Component" of "Application Y". The descriptor is also known as a Predicate.

Configuration item types

A configuration item type (or CI type) is the data type of the element or configuration item an enterprise wishes to store within the CMDB. At a minimum, all software, hardware, network, and storage CI types are stored and tracked in a CMDB. As enterprises mature, they start to track business CI types in their CMDB, such as people, markets, products, and 3rd party entities such as vendors and partners. This allows the relationships between CIs to become more meaningful and the CMDB to become a stronger source for knowledge management.

CI types are:

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.

Schematic representations

CMDB schematic structures, also known as database schemas, take on multiple forms. Two of the most common forms are those of a relational data model and a semantic data model.

Relational data models are based on first-order predicate logic and all data is represented in terms of tuples that are grouped into relations. In the relational model, related records are linked together with a "key", where the key is unique to an entry's data type definition. Such relational models provide declarative methods for specifying data and queries. In other words, users directly state what information the database contains and what information they want from it, and let the database system take care of describing data structures for storing the data and retrieval procedures for answering queries.

Semantic data models typically rely on the resource description framework that maps the relation between a number of things through the use of relationship descriptors, giving context to how things are related to each other.

Challenges

There are three specific core challenges to creating and maintaining a Configuration Management Database:

Because of the above reasons, companies usually choose to purchase their CMDBs, rather than designing, building, delivering, and supporting them themselves.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Database</span> Organized collection of data in computing

In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and analyze the data. The DBMS additionally encompasses the core facilities provided to administer the database. The sum total of the database, the DBMS and the associated applications can be referred to as a database system. Often the term "database" is also used loosely to refer to any of the DBMS, the database system or an application associated with the database.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Configuration management</span> Process for maintaining consistency of a product attributes with its design

Configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon systems, military vehicles, and information systems. Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data dictionary</span> Set of metadata that contains definitions and representations of data elements

A data dictionary, or metadata repository, as defined in the IBM Dictionary of Computing, is a "centralized repository of information about data such as meaning, relationships to other data, origin, usage, and format". Oracle defines it as a collection of tables with metadata. The term can have one of several closely related meanings pertaining to databases and database management systems (DBMS):

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Entity–relationship model</span> Model or diagram describing interrelated things

An entity–relationship model describes interrelated things of interest in a specific domain of knowledge. A basic ER model is composed of entity types and specifies relationships that can exist between entities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data modeling</span> Creating a model of the data in a system

Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. It may be applied as part of broader Model-driven engineering (MDE) concept.

Enterprise information integration (EII) is the ability to support a unified view of data and information for an entire organization. In a data virtualization application of EII, a process of information integration, using data abstraction to provide a unified interface for viewing all the data within an organization, and a single set of structures and naming conventions to represent this data; the goal of EII is to get a large set of heterogeneous data sources to appear to a user or system as a single, homogeneous data source.

Database design is the organization of data according to a database model. The designer determines what data must be stored and how the data elements interrelate. With this information, they can begin to fit the data to the database model. A database management system manages the data accordingly.

Information technology service management (ITSM) are the activities performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control IT services offered to customers.

The term configuration item (CI) refers to the fundamental structural unit of a configuration management system. Examples of CIs include individual hardware or software components. The configuration-management system oversees the life of the CIs through a combination of processes and tools by implementing and enabling the fundamental elements of identification, change management, status accounting, and audits. This system aims to avoid the introduction of errors related to lack of testing as well as of incompatibilities with other CIs.

An entity–attribute–value model (EAV) is a data model optimized for the space-efficient storage of sparse—or ad-hoc—property or data values, intended for situations where runtime usage patterns are arbitrary, subject to user variation, or otherwise unforeseeable using a fixed design. The use-case targets applications which offer a large or rich system of defined property types, which are in turn appropriate to a wide set of entities, but where typically only a small, specific selection of these are instantiated for a given entity. Therefore, this type of data model relates to the mathematical notion of a sparse matrix. EAV is also known as object–attribute–value model, vertical database model, and open schema.

Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) is a publicly available specification from the Object Management Group (OMG). KDM is a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments, that defines common metadata required for deep semantic integration of Application Lifecycle Management tools. KDM was designed as the OMG's foundation for software modernization, IT portfolio management and software assurance. KDM uses OMG's Meta-Object Facility to define an XMI interchange format between tools that work with existing software as well as an abstract interface (API) for the next-generation assurance and modernization tools. KDM standardizes existing approaches to knowledge discovery in software engineering artifacts, also known as software mining.

Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or, more generally, software to be run in virtual machines.

A document-oriented database, or document store, is a computer program and data storage system designed for storing, retrieving and managing document-oriented information, also known as semi-structured data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic data model</span> Database model

A semantic data model (SDM) is a high-level semantics-based database description and structuring formalism for databases. This database model is designed to capture more of the meaning of an application environment than is possible with contemporary database models. An SDM specification describes a database in terms of the kinds of entities that exist in the application environment, the classifications and groupings of those entities, and the structural interconnections among them. SDM provides a collection of high-level modeling primitives to capture the semantics of an application environment. By accommodating derived information in a database structural specification, SDM allows the same information to be viewed in several ways; this makes it possible to directly accommodate the variety of needs and processing requirements typically present in database applications. The design of the present SDM is based on our experience in using a preliminary version of it. SDM is designed to enhance the effectiveness and usability of database systems. An SDM database description can serve as a formal specification and documentation tool for a database; it can provide a basis for supporting a variety of powerful user interface facilities, it can serve as a conceptual database model in the database design process; and, it can be used as the database model for a new kind of database management system.

An ITIL Visual Configuration Management Database is a series of spreadsheet applications that integrates the CMDB with Change Management and Service Level Management. A Visual CMDB provides a unified view of IT infrastructure in a visual representation. This common view is a cornerstone for implementing a successful Configuration Management process.

Database preservation usually involves converting the information stored in a database to a form likely to be accessible in the long term as technology changes, without losing the initial characteristics of the data.

Apache Empire-db is a Java library that provides a high level object-oriented API for accessing relational database management systems (RDBMS) through JDBC. Apache Empire-db is open source and provided under the Apache License 2.0 from the Apache Software Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Definitive media library</span>

A definitive media library is a secure information technology repository in which an organisation's definitive, authorised versions of software media are stored and protected. Before an organisation releases any new or changed application software into its operational environment, any such software should be fully tested and quality assured. The definitive media library provides the storage area for software objects ready for deployment and should only contain master copies of controlled software media configuration items (CIs) that have passed appropriate quality assurance checks, typically including both procured and bespoke application and gold build source code and executables. In the context of the ITIL best practice framework, the term definitive media library supersedes the term definitive software library referred to prior to version ITIL v3.

Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (NLP) and ETL, the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge or the generation of a schema based on the source data.

The following is provided as an overview of and topical guide to databases:

References

  1. ↑ "Configuration items layers".
  2. ↑ "What is CMDB (configuration management database)?". TechTarget. July 2017. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  3. ↑ "IT: disconnected from the business?". Axios Systems . 2015-11-10. Archived from the original on 2019-12-06. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  4. ↑ "Whitepaper: Ansible in Depth" . Ansible (software) . Retrieved 2019-01-14. There are many points of integration that can be used to extend Ansible, including: (...) inventory data retrieved from CMDB systems or cloud sources.
  5. ↑ Sauvé, Jacques; Rebouças, Rodrigo; Moura, Antão; Bartolini, Claudio; Boulmakoul, Abdel; Trastour, David (2006). Business-Driven Decision Support for Change Management: Planning and Scheduling of Changes. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 173–184. doi:10.1007/11907466_15. ISBN   978-3-540-47662-7.
  6. ↑ "CMDBf | DMTF". www.dmtf.org. Retrieved 2021-04-21.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.