From configuration management database (CMDB) to configuration management system (CMS)

From configuration management database (CMDB) to configuration management system (CMS) Utilizing an integrated CMDB to enable service asset and configuration management

Table of contents Introduction....3 You say configuration items, I say assets. Are we both correct?...3 The convergence of IT Service Management and IT Asset Management....4 CMDB dashed upon the rocks of IT reality...5 The integrated CMDB as the core of your configuration management system....5 The HP solution for CMS and SACM...6 Conclusion...8

Figure 1: Overlap of attributes between configuration items (CIs) and assets CIs Assets IT services Documentation Hardware Software People Knowledge Information Organizations Management Introduction Is an asset a configuration item? Is a configuration item an asset? What is the difference? Assets and configuration items have always been loosely coupled and contentiously contrasted by primarily two different groups within IT. And compounding the confusion even further, organizations often view their IT environment from two different perspectives: operational and financial. In the recent refresh of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), recognition was given to how maturing IT organizations must leverage an integrated and automated solution to manage unique items (assets and configuration items) from both perspectives. This paper will discuss how HP Universal Configuration Management Database (ucmdb) software, HP Service Manager software, and HP Asset Manager software deliver an integrated service asset and configuration management solution. You say configuration items, I say assets. Are we both correct? The definition of a configuration item (CI) from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is: any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT Service. 1 CIs commonly include IT services, hardware, and software but can also include people and formal documentation. A good working definition for an IT asset is: any IT resource or capability where ownership and financial value can be tracked and access can be controlled. 2 A resource can be viewed as a superset of CIs, also including reserves such as money. A capability refers to an intangible asset, such as a facility or potential for an indicated use or deployment. Assets typically include infrastructure and applications, but can also include knowledge, people, information, management, organizations, and processes. Upon examining these definitions, there is clear overlap between assets and CIs, as shown in Figure 1. 1 ITIL V3 glossary. 2 ITIL and Asset wiki. 3

Even within the intersection of CIs and assets, the attributes of interest for the component are different depending on the use either as a CI or as an asset. While the focus of configuration item attributes are primarily concerned with the operational implications, asset attributes are primarily focused on financial implications, as seen in Figure 2. Figure 2: Differences among attributes of CIs and assets Configuration item Stewardship Managed Service impact Attribute change Fault history Related SLAs Asset Location Ownership Purchased/leased Financial impact Depreciation Vendor history Related contracts The primary concern for CIs is determining who has responsibility for managing the item and the relationship to other CIs and services. The primary concern for assets is determining who owns the item from a cost perspective so costs can be assigned to the correct budget and total cost of ownership (TCO) can be calculated. The asset lifecycle begins when the item is ordered, acquired, or created as new. The configuration lifecycle starts much later, when the item is managed within the production environment and it supports key delivered services. Understanding the service impact of a CI with respect to risk mitigation is a big concern, especially when changes to the CI occur in the production environment. With assets, the primary concern comes from financial impact and current depreciation if it is a capital asset. From a historical perspective, the effectiveness of the component CI to the service is measured by tracking availability, performance, and contribution to other service-level objectives. With assets we want to understand how the asset s vendor performed over time concerning support and contract fulfillment. Here s where the operational and financial aspects intersect. It is best to fully understand both the financial and operational aspects when renegotiating a vendor contact. IT must know the historical performance, availability, and cost of the asset. Likewise, when supporting individual CIs, it is beneficial to know the asset warranty and support information to assist in repairs. Imagine the item as a beach ball with red and white stripes. Operationally, you might only care to track and manage the red stripes, and financially the white stripes might be the most important aspect. But at what point do both color stripes become part of a greater item? Who keeps the beach ball filled with air? Likewise, in the case where an IT component is important to delivering an IT service, you must manage it and also track ownership, value, and access; it is both an asset and a configuration item. So why does the vast majority of IT organizations discover and manage assets and CIs separately, especially when they refer to the same IT components? The convergence of IT Service Management and IT Asset Management In the past, most IT organizations pushed purchasing decisions down to the IT department or a group function where there was a focus on either the financial or operational aspect, but seldom both. For service or help desk groups, there was rarely a need to manage the financial aspects of configuration items, and for IT Asset Management groups there was rarely a need to understand or care about the details of the operational state. This limited vision has globally propagated throughout IT organizations resulting in varying degrees of disjointed IT asset repositories and CMDBs. This divergence devolved from the need for different views of the same object to meet the needs of various roles, functions, or domains within IT. However, as IT spending becomes more strategic, places where IT functions and processes cross organizational boundaries become more important. Many IT organizations now find it necessary to have both financial and operational views. IT executive management also requires both financial and operational views to effectively make decisions and tradeoffs for value delivered to the business. Since there is so much overlap between assets and configuration items, it makes sense to leverage these usually separate repositories to provide a single integrated solution. Further rationale for converging asset and configuration management is the simple fact that the lifecycle of an asset includes aspects of configuration management, as shown in Figure 3. 4

Figure 3: Asset lifecycle encompasses configuration management Asset lifecycle Request Dispose Procure data merely follows. CIs, relationships, and attributes are stored, audited, or discovered in many different locations and applications. This distribution of data was typically solved through data synchronization, which replicates key data from one data source to another, in this case to the CMDB. Synchronization must be accompanied by reconciliation since many data sources will have different identifications for the same CI and will be the authoritative source for different attributes. IMAC Support Configuration Management Monitor Deploy Receive Stock Synchronization techniques work well for a low number of data sources with thousands of records. However, for hundreds of thousands of records, replication is very time-consuming and resource intensive. Additionally, with larger numbers of records and sources, the frequency of data synchronization must be significantly reduced based upon the time it takes to replicate the data and consideration of the resources consumed (network, system, database, and storage) that impact data accuracy. However, typical sources of CIs and assets are distinct and follow separate, yet similar, paths. Both require the underlying data stores to be harmonious while still separate and heterogeneous since the underlying data is different. It follows that service asset and configuration management (SACM) is the logical or physical convergence of these data sources to support operational and financial visibility. This integrated approach allows IT and IT processes to function across organizational boundaries, which are the main thrust of both ITIL V3 and HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO). CMDB dashed upon the rocks of IT reality The vast majority of configuration management repositories are currently supported by the IT service desk application. In order to connect the key IT process of service request, incident, problem, change, and release management, the service desk requires a common understanding of CIs and how they are related. Configuration management tracks and controls these CIs and relationships throughout their managed lifecycle. Because of this, most CMDB implementations have been physical data stores directly attached to the IT service desk application. Unfortunately, most IT environments are inherently distributed and CI-relevant The integrated CMDB as the core of your configuration management system The CMS concept was introduced in ITIL V3 as a better representation of how authoritative data stores can be leveraged through a logical scheme, as opposed to a physical data store. ITIL defines a CMS in this way: To manage large and complex IT services and infrastructures, Service Asset and Configuration Management requires the use of a supporting system known as the Configuration Management System (CMS). The CMS holds all the information for CIs within the designated scope. At the data level, the CMS may take data from several physical CMDBs, which together constitute a federated CMDB. Other data sources will also plug into the CMS such as the definitive media libraries. The CMS will provide access to data in asset inventories wherever possible rather than duplicating data. 3 3 ITIL Service Transition, 4.3. 5

Figure 4: Integrated CMDB with actionable federation Data consumers Client integration Integrated CMDB Core service data Discovery and mapping Federation Project and portfolio Application quality J2EE UNIX Clients WANs SANs User identities SLAs Owners Service desk Extended service data Asset Changes Incidents Events License usage Projects Costs Business service automation SLA status Compliance status Security status Configuration data Management data Processed data Business service management LDAP Outsourcer s CMDB Data sources A more scalable and flexible means of enabling a CMS is through a federated approach. On May 29, 2009, Wikipedia provided a general-purpose description of database federation: A federated database system transparently integrates multiple autonomous database systems into a single federated database. Since the constituent database systems remain autonomous, a federated database system is a contrastable alternative to the (sometimes daunting) task of merging together several disparate databases. Through federation, a virtual CMS is created by linking data from multiple repositories through a common service context. As ITIL explains, Often, several tools need to be integrated to provide the fully automated solution across platforms, for example, federated CMDB. 4 A federated approach allows specialized management tools and repositories to exist in their current forms. Using federation services coupled with an integrated CMDB, facilitates sharing of specialized information among various IT management domains. With a federated approach to a CMS, an organization s existing tools and repositories work with information in an integrated CMDB to form a large virtual database of information related to the services IT provides to the business. An integrated CMDB physically stores core service data that primarily identifies CIs, lists basic attributes about each CI, and maps the dependencies between CIs and services. Extended service data is the other non-replicated data that remains in external sources but is made accessible through the federated CMS. ITIL V3 refers to these external data sources as data and information sources and tools or more simply, federated data sources. These federated data sources are simply tools and repositories that hold service information other management domains may need to access. Federated data sources may hold information about certain CI attributes or the management of CIs, or they may be the authoritative source for a class of CIs. For example, a lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) server may be the authoritative source for people CIs. 4 ITIL Service Transition, 7.3. 6

Figure 5: The HP SACM solution HP Service Manager HP PPM HP BAC HP OM HP RC Data consumers HP Asset Manager Client integration Integrated CMDB Core service data Discovery and mapping Federation Inventory Extended service data HP Service Manager HP PPM HP BAC HP OM 3rd Party HP Asset Manager Data sources Federated data sources may include any number of IT management tools (service desks, event management systems, IT asset repositories) as well as enterprise systems such as LDAP, human resources (HR), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that provide details about service users, service provider partners, cost centers, financial records, and more. These systems do not need to be modified to participate in the federated CMS. Federation adapters (data adapters to specific data sources) make selected data from the federated data sources available on demand. This concept is depicted in figure 4. The HP solution for CMS and SACM The HP solution for SACM relies on three key pieces, which are fully federated to provide the most efficient solution for medium and large enterprises. The key HP products and their roles within the solution are: HP Universal CMDB, the authoritative source of all services, CIs, relationships, and current state taking the role of integrated CMDB with dynamic federation HP Service Manager, the authoritative source of all process artifacts (incidents, problems, changes, known error records) and CI managed state, future state, and historical state; the IT service desk HP Asset Manager, the authoritative source of asset, physical, and software information; controls the asset lifecycle and provides tactical financial management This translates into the following CMS system architecture relative to SACM, as shown in figure 5. The benefits of this approach compared to the legacy synchronization techniques are that it scales to meet the needs of very large and distributed IT architectures and organizations. This approach provides immediate access to current information either stored in the ucmdb s core service data or dynamically federated to the extended data, in this case, held within both HP Service Manager and HP Asset Manager. This instant access to relevant information helps IT organizations bridge the operational and financial aspects of running IT. Providing relevant data from the applications being used by different IT functions eliminates much of the need to have those users working in multiple applications, thereby making them more focused and efficient. This solution extends past SACM to other data sources. The CMS provides a consistent service model across IT for strategy, applications, and operations software that is utilized on a day-to-day basis. As an example, dynamic access to data can provide the IT service desk with availability or warranty information at the touch of a button. 7

Conclusion With a significant overlap between assets and configuration items, and with most IT organizations managing both, it has been historically regrettable that relevant data and tools have evolved in different directions. However, what was once an unfortunate reality is now a potential area of strategic advantage, as process best practices and technology allow the disciplines of asset and configuration management to harmonize. The more CIs and assets are detected, managed, and derived from multiple, diverse sources, the better the whole of the data set. Data from multiple sources that are integrated, federated, and reconciled enables more timely, accurate, and higher quality data. Having a centrally integrated CMS, that contains core data and federates to extended data, provides the ability to have both diverse authoritative sources, and the most recent discovered data without the overhead of replication and reconciliation. The service asset and configuration management solution allows organizations to have both an operational and financial view of the same item or object while allowing individual departments to work within the context and applications they are used to. HP Universal CMDB, HP Service Manager, and HP Asset Manager provide a complete solution for SACM and a foundation to a CMS for a fully integrated ITIL V3 solution covering all processes, functions, and organizations. Technology for better business outcomes To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/cms Copyright 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 4AA2-7033ENW, July 2009