Virima Automated Configuration Management Database
Do you often associate terms like complex and cumbersome with a configuration management database (CMDB)? Get a modern, user-friendly visual CMDB experience with Virima that will change the way you think about CMDB. It is designed under the ITILⓇ framework but also offers many options for automation and flexible configuration management processes.
Virima CMDB transforms your service delivery by leveraging automated discovery to populate and maintain accurate configuration data. Get insightful CMDB visualizations of asset relationships, service dependencies, and availability status with intuitive dashboards and ViVID Services Maps.
Increase CMDB Accuracy through Automation
Inaccurate data is the number one reason CMDB efforts fail and reliance on too many manual processes is usually the culprit. Virima CMDB solves this through intelligent automation that begins with discovery and includes granular business rules to eliminate the tedious tasks of CMDB maintenance.
Make Factual Decisions with Reliable Insights
CMDB accuracy is important but how the data becomes “operationalized” means the difference between simple configuration knowledge and truly actionable intelligence. Virima CMDB connects the IT dots for easily consumed data and less guesswork for fueling fast, reliable and sound decisions.
Enhance ITAM, ITSM, and ITOM
A trustworthy CMDB is foundational to almost every aspect of modern IT organizations from IT Ops, DevOps, IT SecOps, finance and compliance. Whether linking Virima CMDB with Virima’s own ITAM, ITSM and ITOM features or leveraging with other solutions, accurate data and actionable insights deliver immeasurable value to organizations of all sizes.
How Virima CMDB works
As you would expect with any advanced configuration management database, Virima CMDB is your single source of truth for all hardware and software asset information. This includes hardware configurations, operating system details, installed software and patches, locations, ownership, contracts, SLA’s, CI updates and so much more.
What really sets Virima CMDB apart is how Virima Discovery machine-learned relationship and interdependency maps are presented in the Virima Visual Impact Display (ViVID). ViVID not only provides a clear visual representation of every asset’s relationships, but when linked to Virima ITSM or supported 3rd party platforms and NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD), Virima CMDB becomes your go-to place for change planning, incident response and vulnerability remediation prioritization.
Leverage Virima CMDB to:
- Store and process Virima Discovery asset, configuration and relationship data
- Maintain a complete hardware and software inventory and history of all CI updates
- Get dynamic and filterable visualizations of complex CMDB relationships with ViVID Service Mapping
- Use with Change Management to identify risk, impact and stakeholders
- Use with Incident Management to identify root cause and full impact of service disruptions
- Prioritize vulnerability remediation efforts based on criticality of assets
Features
A CMDB plays many important roles in improving your IT processes including Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM), Change, Incident and Problem Management, IT Asset Management, vulnerability and risk management, audit and compliance reporting.
Some major features of Virima CMDB include:
Understand Complex CI Relationships Better with ViVID Service Maps
- Dynamic and filterable visualizations of complex CMDB relationships
- Automatic application dependency and service mapping provided by Virima Discovery
- Holistic infrastructure relationships and network topology views
- Communication view shows flow and port numbers of host-to-host communications, including “ghost machines” not in the CMDB
- DevOps-style service topology views
- All views include overlays of ITSM incidents and changes and NVD vulnerabilities to help identify the cause of issues, reduce the risk of change and prioritize remediation efforts
Reduce Manual Intervention with CMDB Automation
- Leverage Virima IT Discovery to populate and maintain the database with accurate data
- Create granular business rules to automate the promotion of CI updates and other CMDB maintenance tasks
- Automatic two-way synching to leading ITSM platforms
- Build reusable import templates to ingest structured data from CSV files to automatically link to asset records
- Flexible asset classification and search parameters allow for personalized reports and dashboards
A True Visual CMDB to Achieve Data-driven Outcomes
- ITIL compliant Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM)
- Easy to follow review processes to ensure a pristine configuration management database
- Track hundreds of hardware and software configuration attributes for data center, edge, cloud, and IoT assets
- Over 120 pre-defined and configurable asset blueprints with no limits on creating custom blueprints
- Full audit history and versioning of all configurable item (CI) updates
- Every asset linked to what it supports and is supported by
- Insightful automated CMDB visualizations comprising data and relationships
Identify and Prioritize Vulnerabilities
- NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) integration included at no additional charge
- Discovery data is used to perform automatic check for known CPE’s and CVE’s
- ViVID Service Mapping makes prioritizing remediation efforts based on assets criticality to the business fast and easy
- Add an extra layer of protection to existing vulnerability management tools
- Generate vulnerability reports to share with relevant stakeholders and auditors
Break Down Silos with an Integrated Solution
- Seamless integration with Virima Discovery, ITAM, and ITSM
- The easy to configure AWS and Azure ensure critical cloud assets are also included in the CMDB
- Granular options for syncing CMDB assets with external CMDBs such as ServiceNow, Ivanti and Cherwell
- Get support for dozens of other integrations, including NIST NVD, monitoring, alerting, warranty, and event management systems
Consumable CMDB Data to Make Faster, Better Decisions
- Comprehensive and customizable dashboards provide insightful CMDB information
- ViVID Service Maps visualize the big picture to reduce the guesswork of planning for change or responding to service disruptions
- Prioritize vulnerability remediation efforts based on the criticality of the asset
- Ingestion of data from dozens of integrations ensures a complete configuration management database for better decisions
- Powerful mining capabilities of CMDB software data and reports aid in inventory, software license, security, and GRC audits
CMDB Best Practices
The value of Configuration Management Database (CMDB) software is undisputed when carefully implemented and maintained with a clear plan in place on how it should be leveraged.
Below is a list of six steps to ensure the success of your CMDB implementation and to get the maximum value from your configuration management activities:
- Defining clear business objectives for Change and Configuration Management will help you understand what kind of configuration you need, where to source it from, who will use it, and how much data quality matters to your organization.
- If you are going to manage change within your IT environment effectively, you need a set of discovery tools to help you. It isn’t practical to manually update configuration data when systems or dependencies tend to change often.
- A CMDB is simply a database, a place to store information. Your IT Service Management (ITSM)system provides the tools, workflows, and interfaces that enable users to interact with your configuration data and convert it into tangible business value so make sure the two go hand and hand.
- Automation doesn’t mean total set and forget. Someone should be tasked with making sure automated tasks such as discovery and business rules continue to produce desired results. This may be as simple as reviewing daily dashboard and log reports. IT environments are very dynamic. New assets are deployed and old ones decommissioned. New IP subnets may be spun up and new cloud resources added. Also application and service owners should periodically review service dependency maps to confirm accuracy as manually created associations may change which discovery will be blind to.
- If you want your CMDB software to have a high level of data quality, you need to establish a data entry, maintenance and sunset plan. This includes a set of tools, processes, and policies for how to get non-discoverable data into the CMDB and keep it current. Deleting data, particularly hardware and software assets, is not considered to be a good configuration management practice so an effective CMDB maintenance plan must also include a process for decommissioning retired assets.
- Dependency and relationship data is complex and often hard for IT staff to make sense of it all. The easiest, fastest, and most valuable way for your ITSM users to grasp the big picture is through clear, precise and personalized business service maps that depict end-to-end and cloud to ground dependency chains. Without readily accessible visualizations of complex service and dependency maps, you will find it difficult to harvest the full value potential from your CMDB software. Instead you’ll end up with nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet that soon gets tossed aside because no one saw much value in maintaining and leveraging it.
Why Virima?
Virima’s configuration management automation for hybrid IT environments ensures your C-suite, ITOps, DevOps, SecOps, and GRC stakeholders gain the critical insights needed to make informed and timely decisions. Best of all, Virima’s intelligent CMDB automation capabilities are SaaS delivered and available for an extremely low total cost of ownership. Nothing beats Virima’s value!
Virima CMBD which includes Virima’s Visual Impact Display (ViVID) enhances your control over the asset relationships, service dependencies, and availability statuses. We hand the power to the C-suite by backing up their decision making with powerful insights. Virima is a trustworthy partner for time-efficient and accurate CMDB and service mapping solutions.
Challenges & Solutions
A CMDB (configuration management database) is a data repository that stores information about your IT ecosystem. This includes hardware and software assets, also known as configuration items. These are the components that are used to deliver IT services. A true CMDB also depicts relationships between assets and the IT services they support as well as who is responsible for supporting the asset and who benefits from use of the asset.
A configuration item is generally anything that is subject to a change control process. It can be a physical device such as a server or installed software like an IIS website. A CI could also be an aggregation of both hardware and software. Assets generally not considered CI’s are things like peripherals (i.e. a mouse or monitor) hardware components like a CPU. Each CI is designated for configuration management and treated as a single entity in the configuration management process.
CMDBs are used to keep track of the state of assets in real time and the relationship between all assets including the major applications and services they support. A CMDB helps an organization understand the relationship between the components of a system and to track their configurations. The maintenance of this information allows for certain actions to occur at any point in time. CMDBs can also be used for things like impact analysis, root cause analysis, or change management.
A CMDB helps change managers understand the impact of making a requested change to a CI could have on other CI’s including the applications and services they support. CMDB’s that do a good job of visualizing these relationships vastly assist in the decision making process to allow the change to occur as planned or require additional safeguards. A CMDB also tracks a CI’s configuration changes over time which can be useful if a change needs to be rolled back or to demonstrate that proper change procedures were followed.
- Define what benefits you expect to get from a CMDB and source the right CMDB software for the job
- Build a Logical Data Model of the Service Asset and Configuration Management Process with relationships
- Define Configuration Item (CI) types
- Assign an owner to each CI type
- Define attributes for each CI type
- Identify sources of information for your CIs (i.e. Discovery, import, manual entry)
- Map relationships between assets (i.e. hardware to software, system to system, system to business service)
- Focus on one CI type at a time, usually ones that provide the most value to have in the CMDB and are generally easy to capture such as servers and PC’s (Don’t try to do it all at once without a powerful tool like Virima Discovery!)
Automated discovery automatically generates and updates data to capture the condition of the current IT environment. The discovery tools like Virima IT Discovery enables your IT team to take a more hands-off approach to configuration management. When integrated with Virima CMDB, the tool offers agentless IP-based scanning of both your on-premise and cloud environments to automatically detect thousands of physical and virtual assets.
Automation is the answer to simplifying your CMDB maintenance, including initial mapping and ongoing population updates. Leverage discovery tools like Virima IT Discovery to populate and maintain the database with accurate data. A CMDB without discovery can be very cumbersome, so it is wise to implement discovery as soon as you can.
With an integrated CMDB like Virima, you can link all or selected Configuration Management data and Business Service Maps with external CMDBs such as ServiceNow, Ivanti and Cherwell. You can also get support for other integrations, including monitoring, alerting, vulnerability warranty, and event management systems.
The accuracy of a CMDB depends on the data you have provided. A true, visual CMDB will track hundreds of hardware and software configuration attributes to provide insightful CMDB visualizations comprising data and relationships. There are many input options for CMDBs and each option comes with a potential for error. Manual inputs and spreadsheet data often leads to data sets with inaccurate information. Third-party discovery tools integrated with commercial CMDBs often help in keeping the CMDB data accurate and up-to-date as it transforms scanned data to easily consumed visualizations.
Use Cases
Change Management
When it comes to evaluating change management software, Virima sets the bar for flexibility, breadth of features, ease of use, and outstanding value. It truly puts you in control
Build a CMDB
Do you feel like CMDB (configuration management database) is a puzzle you can’t solve because there’s no automatic way to build and maintain it?
How Discovery and Service Mapping Create Value for IT
Virima can tell you more things about more IT assets with greater accuracy than ever imagined and present the info in a variety of powerful, dynamic visualizations and reports.
