CMDB: A Top-Down Approach

Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) play a fundamental role in helping companies better align technology with their business goals. However, implementing a CMDB is not exactly an overnight process. This deployment challenge can be off-putting to companies that fear it will be years before they see any return on their investment. However, this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Dustin McNabb, vice president of technology management vendor Managed Objects says companies don't necessarily have to wait years to recoup their investment. McNabb, whose company debuted its new federated CMDB last week, spoke with Systems Management Pipeline Editor Amy Larsen DeCarlo about how enterprises can accelerate the time to value from their CMDB.

A.D.: There are a lot of perceptions and some misconceptions about what a CMDB should encompass. What would you like people to understand about CMDBs?

D.M: The industry has to get past this paradigm to recognize that the CMDB is more than an asset database on steroids. When we talk to customers about CMDBs we talk about certainly the needs to incorporate [configuration information] CI attributes information and relationships because, hey, that is what ITIL has been telling us all along. But then there is this whole other set of data that we believe needs to be incorporated into that repository, in a centralized sense or in a federated sense. We tend to align ourselves with the federated model but nonetheless the repository still needs to incorporate the service descriptions themselves.

More importantly, CMDBs still need to incorporate the state information " not only the CIs but the services. This could be more than just up down or on or off. State could be things like inventory, like when you are talking about an inventory system, state could be levels of inventory. Then there is the performance and availability information which I think needs to be incorporated as well. That is the data that drives SLAs.

Emerging in the industry today there is the notion of gold standard CMDB. This is kind of a snapshot of your infrastructure as you know and need it to be in. When it deviates from that, this is cause for concern.A.D.: Which key pieces of information should be included in a CMDB that companies may overlook?

D.M.: Let's focus on the examples of state, performance, and availability for instance: these are key pieces of information that aren't necessarily equated to CI attributes and relationships but nonetheless need to be incorporated into any CMDB implementation if you are to accurately derive such measurements of service level agreements. Without state, performance, or availability, you don't know how to measure your service levels.

I think an even bigger issue is when [other vendors] talk about CMDB content without talking about CMDB implementation best practices. They kind of allude to what I will call a bottom up approach where we boil the ocean and we discover all of our assets and our CIs and we pull all that information together and we group the CI information into logical services and voila five years later we have CMDB

There is a great report that was just published by Forrester research that is entitled "Just Enough CMDB." What Forrester outlines is what we call a top-down approach. This is actually a very simple five step approach to implementing a CMDB. What it does is it gives company an easier, faster way to develop CMDB

What Forrester espouses is identifying two or three services that are critical to the business. It could be order processing or something like I mentioned earlier before like inventory control or online trading or even e-mail and then defining the key three or five metrics that are needed to measure the quality of service needed to measure the delivery of that service. Metrics can be availability, or performance or response time, or even inventory.I think what Forrester is saying is start with a couple of services, define a few key metrics that you can use to effectively measure those services then go out and define (Forrester quantifies this very clearly) the top 50 or 100 CIs that support those services.

Once you have gotten that 50 or 100 CIs that you can logically group into the critical services that support your business then you've got that first slice. And by the way that first slice they say takes 6 to 9 weeks. That is a substantial savings in time-to-value compared to the bottom-up approach that can take anywhere from one to five years.

AD: How do you think most businesses are implementing their Combs today? Are they taking "a top-down or bottoms-up approach?

DM; We find companies are approaching it from both ways but the majority of companies are still looking to vendors or to analysts for direction in terms of what is the best way to implement the CMDB.

AD: Why is it so important for companies to implement a CMDB?D.M.: Companies need to embrace the CMDB idea if they are going to effectively adopt maturity models like ITIL because whether you talk to Forrester or Gartner, analysts believe that the CMDB is the keystone of an effective of a successful ITIL project.

Whether this is incident or problem or change or configuration, and which ever best practices a company chooses to adopt, it needs this foundation to build effective processes and effective practices in your IT organization and to do that you need that fundamental view of your infrastructure. So I think the larger message that companies need to align themselves with is there is a need for a CMDB whether it is a big one or a small one it can depend upon individual company requirements.

CMDBs really are an essential cornerstone of ITIL best practices and process improvements. Our technology is readily aligned with a top down approach. At the same time, for companies that choose to a bottom-up approach, we have the technology to accelerate their implementations.