Can You Trust Your CMDB?
There is a powerfully true aphorism about computing that’s been around for decades: “garbage in, garbage out.” And it has never been more true – or more important – than when it is applied to the challenges of modern IT management.
Your business absolutely requires consolidated, powerful, flexible, and reliable IT resources to do business. And those resources are the foundation upon which your business is building its path toward digital transformation. Your IT infrastructure must therefore be as reliable, secure, and highly performant as possible. All the time. Everywhere.
None of this is possible without effective management of your IT estate. And such management is impossible without accurate, up-to-date information about what’s going on across your IT infrastructure.
Transforming Valuable Data Into Actionable Information
To be clear, the information you need is definitely out there. The problem? It’s largely in forms that make management more difficult instead of easier and better.
A prime example is system and network alerts. These can be incredibly valuable in detecting, isolating, and resolving incidents before they become seriously disruptive problems. They can also be overwhelming.
In November 2017, Spiceworks, a professional IT industry network, conducted an online survey of some 600 IT decision makers in the UK and US. Respondents were from a variety of industries, and from organizations ranging from 250 to 9,999 employees. All employees were involved in cyber security. This is what they found:
- On average, only 20% of alerts that respondents receive are ever investigated.
- More than one-third of respondents i.e., 37%, are still investigating alerts manually.
- Approximately 7% of respondents do absolutely nothing with the alerts they receive.
Even if your business is fortunate enough to be able to process all IT alerts, they only represent part of the larger challenge. You need to be able to distill all the alerts, status reports, and warnings generated by your IT resources and management tools into a single version of the truth.
And you need to be able to extract that information to provide clear, actionable guidance to anyone who needs it. This includes system administrators, support providers, financial executives, auditors, regulators, or those planning the future of IT at your business.
You Need IT Discovery and a CMDB
To turn your IT management data deluge into clear, consistent, and actionable information, you first need to collect the data effectively. For that, you need thorough, automated IT discovery and documentation of your IT assets, and the relationships that interconnect them with your users, applications, and each other.
You also need a modern Configuration Management Database . Whatever underlying technologies you use to build it, it must become the host platform for your single version of the truth.
Your CMDB must be where all the data from all your IT assets comes together and gets rationalized, and validated. This data is then converted into clear, actionable dashboards, reports, and other guidance, as scheduled and on demand. Your chosen CMDB solution should also support easy-to-use templates and tools for creating and tailoring those dashboards and reports.
Automated, comprehensive IT discovery, business service mapping, and visualization, combined with a powerful, flexible CMDB, can tame your data deluge. Together, they can also improve every element of your IT asset, service, and digital transformation management in your business.
(Also read, Why your business needs intelligent IT automation now)
IT Management With Virima
Virima’s solutions for IT Discovery, IT Asset Management (ITAM), and IT Service Management (ITSM) provide the functionality and ease of use you require to deliver maximum management of your IT environment, economically and with minimal disruption or risk.
They can capture and store inventory data about your IT environment’s components automatically. They can map dependencies, visualize relationships, and provide accurate, complete, and timely information about your environment.
With Virima, you build a CMDB you can trust. Once Virima has discovered and mapped your IT assets, a daily scan discovers and highlights any changes to them. You can have the changes reflected immediately, or validated by integrated change management features before they are promoted to your CMDB.
If you don’t have a CMDB, Virima offers an ITIL®-certified Service Asset Configuration Management (SACM) solution. Virima also offers a suite of managed services to help speed your Virima tool deployments, during implementation or anytime your needs or goals change. Virima can even monitor your deployments and suggest improvements over time.
Want to make your IT environment manageable, responsive, secure, and valuable to your business? Virima is here to help.
Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.
