Understanding the relationship between Asset Management and the CMDB Remedy v 703 Janie Sprenger janiesprenger@gmail.com November 2009
Introduction This paper introduces you to Asset Management and the CMDB. The following topics are discussed: Understanding Asset Management Understanding Configuration Management Understanding the CMDB Configuration and Asset Management Differences How the CMDB and Asset Management work together Understanding Asset Management What is Asset Management? Asset Management is the discipline of managing an Asset through its lifecycle from requisition to retirement. Asset Management is comprised of activities which relate to: Managing an Asset s financial considerations (procurement, leasing, vendor management, cost accounting, etc) Contractual agreements and commitments (purchase requisitions and purchase orders, support and/or maintenance agreements, warranties, licensing, etc) Management of inventory Asset Management activities are performed for the purpose of maintaining an optimal balance between business service requirements, costs, budget predictability and contractual and/or regulatory compliance. What is an Asset? An Asset is any property with a commercial business value. Understanding Configuration Management What is Configuration Management? Configuration Management is the process of keeping control of the ever evolving and inter-related IT configuration items that make up the organization s IT infrastructure. The objective of Configuration Management is to identify configuration items, and to systematically record changes to those items for purposes of maintaining data integrity as it relates to the configuration item s characteristics, relationships, traceability, and audit-ability. Configuration Management begins once the configuration item has entered the infrastructure and ends when it has been officially removed from use within the infrastructure. Configuration Management encompasses all IT configuration items that 2
impact the organization s infrastructure including servers, routers, software, services, personnel and processes. What is a CI? A CI is a configuration item and is any component of an infrastructure. For example, a CI can be hardware or software components, a service, an inventory location, or a network (LAN or WAN), etc. CIs can vary widely in complexity, size, and type, from an entire system to a single component. Understanding the CMDB What is a CMDB? A CMDB is a tool for Configuration Management. The CMDB contains CIs. If implemented correctly, the CMDB will show a complete view of your infrastructure and related services, assets, components, and software. Where CIs come from The following figure depicts how CIs arrive in the CMDB. There are primarily two methods for the CMDB to be populated: Manual and Automated. The Manual method requires that a user enter information to create the CI. The Automated method depends on an integration with another data source to populate the data in the CMDB. Figure 1: Depiction of where CIs come from Configuration and Asset Management Differences What is the difference? The process of managing IT configuration items actually starts with an inventory list from Finance showing Asset tags and locations. The Asset Management process adds financial and Asset lifecycle data. The Configuration Management process builds on the Asset database for CIs that will be under Incident or Change Management. The Configuration Management process adds relationship information between CIs. This allows services to be mapped, and then allows service performance to be managed. 3
Each of these processes (Inventory, Asset, and Configuration Management) build on (and depend on) the previous process. Configuration Management vs. Asset Management Configuration Management Goal: Provide logical model of IT environment as basis for ITIL process Value: Greater business service stability, availability, and quality (via related ITIL processes) CI: Physical, logical or conceptual IT component managed for its operational impact Relationships: Sophisticated relationships between CIs are maintained to assess Change risk, analyze Root Cause, and assess service impact Asset Management Goal: Manage Asset costs, contracts, and usage/ownership throughout lifecycle Value: Lower Asset acquisition costs, reduced purchasing, more efficient allocation, more accurate budgeting/planning Asset: Physical IT Component tracked based on financial value or contractual compliance Relationships: Basic relationships (peer, parent, or child) between Assets are maintained for retirement process, ownership, and license matching How the CMDB and Asset Management work together Now that we understand Asset Management versus a CMDB, it is time to understand how the Asset Management application and the CMDB work together for the application user. The following figure shows that the User accesses the Asset Management Application forms to access and operate on CIs in the CMDB. Asset Management Application CMDB CIs Figure 2: How the CMDB and AM app work together 4
1. The Asset Management application contains the forms (or screens) that show the CIs that reside in the CMDB. 2. The words, CI and Asset, are often synonymous; although not all CIs will have Asset functionality applied to them. a. For example, a Person can be a CI; however, you would never go through the Procurement process (AM functionality) to order a Person. 3. All Asset Users utilize the Asset Management application forms to carry out the procedures to handle the Asset and Configuration Management processes. 4. Only Application Administrators and Advanced Asset Administrators will ever need to utilize the CMDB forms which also show all CIs in the CMDB. 5