CMDB Implementations don’t have the greatest reputation. A quick search on Google yields titles like “CMDB is dead”, “ITIL’s dead elephant”, and “The top 10 reasons a CMDB implementation fails”.

So how about 2 tips that will make your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) succeed? Only 2 pieces of advice, compared to 10 failure reasons – but hey, we’re about quality not quantity.

What’s the purpose of a CMDB?

Let’s start at the end. Why are companies spending all the effort & resources on building a CMDB? Creating a repository is not an end goal in itself. There are quite a few reasons behind a CMDB, and these two are probably among the top ones:

• Change management – be able to identify how IT changes will impact your business environment.
• Incident resolution – use CMDB as a reference to quickly resolve problems – identify problematic IT components, understand the interrelations with other CIs, and so forth.

So with these 2 goals in mind, here are our 2 pieces of advice:

Use business services entry points

Begin your CMDB journey with your end goal – the business service. Discovery of applications, CIs and relationships – all should be done in the context of a business service in order for them to be useful later when they are needed for change management or incident resolution.

But now comes the question – how do you define a business service? Seems like a no brainer, but reality is – you’ll find some major disagreement on this (more on this in a separate blog post).

We say, keep it simple – find a unique identification for each business service. The best approach is to follow the way users ‘consume’ or access the service. Put in other words – find a tool that lets you begin populating the CMDB by providing an entry point of the business service. Whether it’s the URL, an IP address, or any other address – this should be the starting point for each business service to allow identifying all of the IT elements comprising the service.

Use automatic mapping of CIs to business services

If the CMDB is to help you resolve incidents and analyze impact of IT failures on your business, it must clearly map CIs to business services. The important question, though, is – how is this mapping done, manually or automatically?

A few words about ‘mapping’. There is a lot of confusion in the IT space around this term and its variations. For example, ‘discovery and dependency mapping’ has become a popular phrase often used by many vendors. But what stands behind it, in most cases, is the automated discovery of applications, CIs, and their interrelationships – and not their mapping to business services, which needs to be carried out manually.

So our second tip is – when building your CMDB, make sure the mapping between CIs and business services is automatically created. Or else, you’ll be spending significant resources on manual updates.