Best CMDB Tools: What Do They Feature?

What is a CMDB and why do you need one?

Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is not dead, but it needs to evolve.

CMDB tools are critical to ensuring that all your IT systems are working together smoothly, and they’ve been around for quite some time now, but they’re still not getting all the attention they deserve. It’s no wonder: there are so many moving parts when it comes to IT, and even if you have a dedicated team keeping track of your systems, it can be hard to keep track of who’s doing what with what. 

The rise of digital transformation has created a whole new set of challenges for companies, including how they manage their data. Every day, people get frustrated trying to collaborate with their colleagues. Being able to share files doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the truth is you need to see the bigger picture. To increase efficiency and reduce friction, your organization needs a smarter way to handle data.

A CMDB is a comprehensive database of all the IT assets in your organization, including hardware and software as well as service-level agreements. It also contains information about how these systems interact with each other. A CMDB helps you manage your IT infrastructure more efficiently and avoid costly problems that may arise if your organization doesn’t have a complete picture of its environment. To implement an effective CMDB solution, it’s important to choose the right platform for your needs.

The major features of an ideal CMDB include:

Auto discovery

Auto discovery is the most impactful feature of a complete CMDB platform. It allows you to automatically discover assets, relationships and dependencies. This means that when you create an asset in your system, it automatically adds to the CMDB. Additionally, if you create a dependency on an existing asset, then you can discover that relationship as well. Once this data is collected it can be used to auto-provision new assets and can also help with maintaining compliance standards by ensuring relationships are correctly mapped between systems based on how they’re defined in your CMDB

Automated discovery, like in Virima CMDB, also makes it easy for enterprises to collect data about vulnerabilities and changes in their systems without having to manually scan through logs or other records looking for relevant information. This allows companies to track changes in their systems quickly so they can respond appropriately when something goes wrong or needs updating.

Categorization

Categorization is a key component of CMDB. It allows you to group your assets into different categories, like ‘computers’ or ‘equipment’, that are more meaningful for your organization.

A good CMDB will help you identify what categories are most important to your business and then create a structure that helps you keep track of those categories.

To help you get started, here’s  an example of a categorization scheme below. With this information at hand, you’ll be able to create your own master list of assets and the corresponding values they represent.

• IT Assets – Hardware, Software, Licenses
• People – Employees, Contractors
• Facilities – Buildings/Areas/Rooms; Parking Spots; Vehicles (Company-owned or leased)

Change management

Change management is a critical component of IT Service Management. It provides a way to track changes to the IT environment, as well as their impact on other components of the IT environment.

Change management is either a business process or an application feature. As such, it involves documenting and tracking changes that affect any part of your network (e.g., hardware upgrades, software updates).

As part of CMDB functionality, change management should provide a central repository for documenting all relevant changes made within your organization’s infrastructure—including both planned and unplanned events such as software updates or hardware replacements.

A perfect example to understand this would be the Virima CMDB that gives you all the tools you need for your change management process. With its flexible workflows, you can customize your change processes to fit your organization’s exact needs. This allows you to automate them as much or as little as you want and enforce strict adherence to all standards with the logs. No matter what kind of business you’re running, effective change management is one of the most important aspects of maintaining an IT infrastructure. Virima CMDB makes it easy to implement and manage.

Service mapping

It’s important to be able to map your services and their dependencies. This is the key for understanding how each service fits into the larger scheme of things and what impact it has on other services, which can be affected by another service. This can help you identify when a service failure is likely or not and what steps should be taken in order to mitigate possible impacts (e.g., failover). 

A complete CMDB platform provides this capability through its ability to provide a graphical view of your IT infrastructure including all components, data sources and interconnections between them so you can easily see how everything fits together. For example, ViVID Service Mapping provides a dynamic visualization of all your CMDB relationships, allowing you to see the big picture of your infrastructure from a holistic perspective.ViVID also helps you identify gaps in your data so that you can fill them in with confidence.

Configuration management data model

The data model is a representation of the real world that defines the structure of your configuration management data. To ensure a consistent understanding and interpretation, it plays an important role in defining requirements and processes for implementing CMDBs.

The data model is a prerequisite for your CMDBs. It defines how you will store, manage and access information about IT assets and relationships between them. The business can then use this information to make decisions about which applications are needed to run their operations smoothly. IT can use it to determine what changes need to be made before deploying new applications into production environments. They can also use this while upgrading existing ones without affecting other systems negatively (i.e., negatively affect availability).

For instance, the data model powering Virima CMDB is flexible enough to support both commercial and custom applications. It also work well on combinations. The data model also allows for easy integration with other systems. This is so that your organization can gain maximum value from your existing investments in IT infrastructure and tools.

Asset management

It is the process of managing and maintaining assets. It ensures they act as expected and are efficiently used. Asset management allows companies to better understand their assets. This, in turn, allows them to make informed decisions about how best to use those assets.

Benefits of asset management include:

• The insights gained from an asset management platform allow you to make better decisions about your IT infrastructure. They also help you avoid problems before they arise. For example, you can use this information when planning new server deployments or adding additional capacity during peak times of usage (e.g., holiday seasons).
• Increased efficiency and cost savings from proactive IT maintenance by monitoring issues before they cause downtime for users or stop business operations altogether (e.g., security breaches).

Event correlation and root cause analysis

Event correlation and root cause analysis is the process of analyzing events and identifying the root cause of an incident. It’s also known as event correlation.

Event correlation identifies patterns in events, which can help us understand how issues arise within a system or software. It is a preventive measure to identify possible solutions before they become problems. Event correlation and root cause analysis help you identify the root cause of an issue by correlating other events that occurred around it. These are errors or unexpected behavior. You’ll then use this information to determine what went wrong, why it happened and how you can prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

With a tool like Virima CMDB, you can:

• Analyze events in real time as they happen so you can respond quickly to problems
• Automatically identify problematic relationships between events and services so that you can address immediately when they occur
• Identify common patterns across different types of issues so that you can plan for them in advance
• Use your existing tools better because Virima CMDB integrates directly with other services

CMDB – A holistic way to manage your services and IT infrastructure

CMDBs allow you to manage your services and IT infrastructure in a holistic way. The ability to collect data about every item of hardware, software, service provider and contract is one of the most important aspects of CMDBs. You can use this information for risk assessment, reporting, service level management and more.

CMDBs are a key component of IT service management (ITSM) solutions. They help organizations maintain control over their technology assets. CMDBs do so by providing them with visibility into what they have deployed as well as where it is located. They also enable you to track which departments or people within your organization are using specific platforms. This is so that you can quickly make changes without impacting productivity or disrupting workflow patterns.

The right CMDB: A decision you can’t afford to get wrong

It’s time to stop thinking about your CMDB as just a tool for asset management. A complete CMDB platform is the one that supports all aspects of IT service management. By addressing each part of the ITIL process, you can ensure that every aspect of your business runs smoothly, while still being able to innovate and grow.

Virima CMDB is a complete CMDB that helps you manage the configuration and software assets in your IT system. It is a powerful tool for compliance, in regards to standards and regulations. These offer total visibility of IT configurations from a single point of truth.

Plus, Virima CMDB’s configurable dashboards are customizable modules for any level of user with simple drag-and-drop functionality. If customized options mean the difference between a happy or an unhappy employee or partner, then you should consider choosing a tool with these features available.

So, what are you waiting for? Request a demo right away!