Control resource outages by managing configuration data with a federated CMDB
from CCR2, Issue 6 - 2006
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CCR2 interviewed Marcus Boone, IBM Change and Configuration Database Market Manager, for this article. In the IT world where up to 85 percent of all resource outages can be traced back to changes to the infrastructure, he explains how a federated data repository and process integration can discover and reveal interrelationships to help you manage configurations, reduce change-induced incidents, and improve IT collaboration with processes designed around people. |
For years, IT has developed and deployed applications, such as those for Enterprise Resource Planning, that provide an efficient platform for business users to document and automate processes, share information, collaborate and drive improvements. While helping others, IT organizations have struggled with their own process challenges and goals to deliver services on time and on budget while meeting increasing demands and greater service level expectations.
The challenge is growing. IT management today is more complicated than in the past when an entire application and its data resided on a single mainframe. As business demanded more access to information, increased agility and integration with external partners, the complexity of IT infrastructures has exploded. Today it’s daunting to understand – let alone manage – IT interdependencies.
Infrastructure complexity makes it difficult for IT staff to anticipate the impact of a system change. As a result, clients tell IBM that as many as 85 percent of the system failure incidents their users report are caused by IT changes (Tivoli Primary Research, 2005). Collaboration across IT teams that focus on domain specialties – such as databases, UNIX servers, mainframes, and storage – demands a better approach. At the root of IT change-induced incidents is a lack of understanding about the effect a particular change could have on other IT components.
Change is required, but unmanaged change is unpredictable and may break your systems. What can you do? Change management control enables better-informed change and prevents IT staff from making modifications without considering all the interdependencies. The IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database enables you to implement change management control and put proactive ITIL processes into practice to maintain your IT service levels.
A central view of configuration data
A configuration management database (CMDB) serves as a single, authoritative repository of configuration item (CI) information and attributes. The database can hold details of every element of your IT infrastructure that you want to put under change control, such as applications, services, systems and service level agreements.
You may already have multiple repositories of configuration information siloed around your enterprise, including some or all of these:
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Operational Management Products (OMPs) used by network administration, database administration, application development, operations, and security compliance officers. |
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Databases, including asset management or service desk repository tools |
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Custom applications and databases |
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Departmental repositories, such as Excel worksheets and Word documents. |
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To manage IT Service in a fluent and effective manner, you can bring together – federate -- this far flung information into a configuration management database that forms a central view. Such a database can provide clear visualization to enable your people to make appropriate assessments and analyses before making decisions about changes, releases and the cause of incidents.
A configuration management database will serve you best with careful selection of the data; it should only store configuration items and configurable attributes – for example, system memory but not historical performance or CPU utilization statistics. Think of the information you need to make good decisions about patch deployment, network card upgrades and complex changes that have potential for even greater impact. Then bring that information into your configuration management database.
Consider also the capabilities that will make for an effective Change and Configuration Management Database, such as:
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Visualization of the configuration items and their relationships and interdependencies. |
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Reconciliation of instances of a single device that may come from multiple tools that track systems for other purposes – you want to avoid duplicate instances of a single server, for example. |
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Federation, so you can go to the source of record to simplify data maintenance. |
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A rich, flexible and published data model |
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Synchronization to schedule the loading of information from other tools into the database, so you have the most current information. |
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Open programming interfaces, so you can reach out to extract information from existing data sources through APIs, and industry standards to facilitate data sharing between tools that collect such information. |
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Change tracking and desired state management, so you can identify what details of your configuration have changed and ensure you stay within a baseline configuration without drift over time. |
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As a gathering place for data from sources across your IT organization, the configuration management database can hold the master copy and also share that information with other management tools.
IBM Tivoli CCMDB: available June 30
This month, IBM will release the IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB), IBM’s platform for IT Service Management, to enable data, workflow and policy integration across IT management processes. The Change and Configuration Management Database federates rich details of configuration items (CIs) collected from automated, agentless discovery of your IT assets and their application dependencies; enables audit and control of configuration items with full configuration and change management processes; and acts as an integration platform for operational management products.
Automatically discover data
IT operations departments are awash in management applications and data but need integrated tooling and data. Instead of reducing the amount of information, IT can benefit from tools that leverage existing information for greater benefit. A discovery library capability will enable the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database to import data from virtually any source of record, whether from an IBM product, an independent software vendor (ISV) product, or a spreadsheet or custom database. The discovery library obtains data directly from the source to load the Change and Configuration Management Database quickly and keep it up-to-date without manual re-entry.
Typically, operational management products lack a critical piece of information required for change management – the transactional and application dependencies between IT components. The CCMDB discovery capability finds resources and transactional relationships that you can use to obtain complete, detailed application maps of business applications and their supporting infrastructure, including storage and Layer 2 network devices (switches). You can store and reveal cross-tier dependencies, run-time configuration values and a complete change history.
Is System z a critical part of your IT environment? Incorporating an end-to-end view, including System z resources, storage resources and distributed resources, will enable a complete view to help you improve change impact and problem analysis. The CCMDB data model supports a variety of z/OS resource types that will continue to be enhanced after General Availability to include specific transactions and databases. Additionally, IBM provides a variety of discovery solutions for the System z environment. This way you can bring automated, agentless mainframe configuration discovery to your Change and Configuration Management Database.
Teams across IBM are working together to provide data integration with other IBM tools as well, such as:
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IBM Tivoli Information Management (InfoMan) |
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IBM Resource Dependency Service (RDS) |
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IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer for z/OS |
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IBM CICS Interdependency Analyzer |
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IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON solutions |
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IBM Tivoli NetView for z/OS |
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IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager for z/OS |
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Integrate your workflows
The IBM IT Service Management platform can also help your IT team with workflows, which allow you to perform similar activities consistently across the organization and to involve the right individuals and information as an activity moves from start to finish. By integrating your workflows with change management tools and other tools you already use, your IT organization can move farther along the path toward automation and control, where changes to your infrastructure are less disruptive to your department and to the business.
In a configuration management context, workflows (processes) provide an efficient, repeatable way to gain control over the changes or activities that take place in the IT environment. For example, they can define the interaction of a configuration management database with discovery tools or establish the user roles and security policies for accessing and modifying the information contained in the database. Consequently, managing workflows is fundamental to implementing more than a configuration database—it is fundamental to truly managing configurations.
With the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, IBM provides best practice workflows that are based on experience from IBM Global Services with customers of all sizes and industries.
Federate your data for better decision making
The IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database delivers a platform for IT Service Management upon which you can integrate data from the tools your IT specialists use today and automate workflows that extend and leverage that IT data. The collaboration enabled by the IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database can help you deliver complete information to the right IT people, so they can make the best decisions before making changes to your IT infrastructure that could impact service.
For more information
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