An Industry Guide to Configuration Management

With the introduction of CMDB concepts and IT management frameworks a stronger emphasis has been placed on visibility of the configuration of an Organisations' overall IT infrastructure. Some organisations have invested heavily in attempting to harness this information platform, with varying degrees of success. The one common element is that the following principle is widely recognised " The implementation of a structured Configuration Management Practice can save some organisations millions of $$$ from their annual IT operating expenses".

Modeling a business case to support this practice and projecting some real $ savings can be a difficult task. The only real gauge available is the historical issues that have been encountered over previous years in your organisation. All those times when your project teams didnt have the data to effectively rollout upgrade or consolidation projects, when no one understood all of the software components in your SOE (Standard Operating Environment), or when no really knew what services were supported by a particular group of servers, or the time when the server room ran out of rack and power capacity and your new servers spent the first 6 months of their lifecycle on the loading dock. Hindsight is one of the best indicators on how this practice can benefit your organisation as well as fostering a more effective approach to change management and operational stability.

There is a vast quantity of information out there, but finding the bit that helps your situation is another thing altogether. If you have had the experience of searching some of the commercial vendor sites you'll know that all the buzz words are there, but not much on exactly how it works. That's part of the mystery that we plan to unravel. What are the specific features of a CMDB that provide the maximum benefit.

Originally this site was focused strongly on only open source offerings and how open source software could solve many of the configuration management issues in todays IT environment. The CMDB Market segment has grown substaintially since then and to ignore the offerings of the commercial software vendors and benefits they provide would be doing a dis-service to visitors to this site. Many open source offerings are still out there, and if you would like to recommend any software to be referenced on this site, please send us a note from the Contact page.

Another key principle that is used for this site is that we do not copy information and provide it on this site, we only provide links to existing information and provide guidance from real industry experience. This approach has been adopted to preserve an unbiased viewpoint as there is alot of information available which is based solely on the opinion of the Spin Doctors that wrote it. And although the industry standard management frameworks such as TOGAF, Cobit & ITIL are recognised for what they have contributed to structured IT Management practice, it should also be recognised that smaller organisations need less structured solutions to solve very similar smaller scale problems.

Some of the key areas that have been highlighted as integral CMDB elements are referenced. They include:

• "What is the definition of a CMDB"

• "Is a federated data source a key requirement for a CMDB?"

• "How should a CMDB be used for the financial tracking of CI's and reconciliation of the monthly accounts"

• "Do all CMDB's require an automated discovery engine"

• "Why most outsource vendors don't want you to have that level of visibility of your network and assets"

• "Configuration Controls"

• "Automated Network Discovery"

• "Asset and Software Management"

• "Up to date risk management assessment capabilities"

• "Data Centre Capacity queries"

• "Data Centre / Server Room cable and power management"

• "Service to systems mapping"

• "Visualisation of Service and Systems mapping"

• "Application and services, service level measurement"

Although the management frameworks reflect best practice, in their purest form they are really just theoretical structures of technology modules and management practice. Much of that practice most probably exists in your organisation today, so hopefully the information on this site will assist organisations in packaging the current output of their practices to feed into their overall CMDB structure. Alternatively there are CMDB type solutions available under Open Source which will suit Small to Medium Businesses right through to the Enterprise. Some of these are featured in our downloads section and others are referenced elsewhere on this site. Open source software provides some great solutions for many of the issues which are at the foundation of the configuration management practice.

The aim here is to promote healthy debate and opinion regarding a wide variety of approaches, vendors, products and tools without prejudice.

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