Tidying up made easy: 4 steps to a complete Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

Author: Klaus Ziegerhofer

Think back to your childhood. Remember when your mother came in after you’d been playing and asked you to tidy up your room? Or when you were moving house, and you had left clearing out and tidying up to the last minute? Let’s face it: no one really wants to tidy up.???

It’s no different in corporate IT. No one really has the time or inclination to comprehensively document an increasingly complex infrastructure made up of different data sources, devices, applications, networks, virtualisation, and hybrid cloud environments.??

Lack of transparency kills every innovation??

But the dimensions are different here. Companies invest in IT to achieve their business goals faster and more efficiently. Nevertheless, initiatives like the standardisation and digitalisation of service and business processes, the automation of software rollouts and service provisioning. or cloud migrations, cannot be realised easily without "cleaning up" first.???

That’s because a lack of IT infrastructure transparency not only increases financial risk for the business, it can also cause reputational damage. Typical examples include:??

• Security attacks due to lack of real-time insight into access and patch data??
• Service failures due to unplanned changes??
• Under-licensing due to incorrect inventory and master data??
• Low productivity due to increased ticket volume??
• Obsolete hardware and software due to non-transparent purchase and warranty data??

A lack of transparency doesn’t just increase workload for IT teams.? It causes a de facto inability to act, because they cannot manage, protect, and optimise something they neither see nor know.

Inventory as a holy grail - Not at all!??

Many IT decision makers might say: "We have IT asset management (ITAM) and inventory tools for this.” That may be true, and quite a few IT organizations use multiple scanning tools with different repositories. But this does not necessarily improve data quality. On the one hand, many tools only scan what is known about devices in the network and so cannot provide a complete picture of all the IT assets that are actually in use. On the other hand, scans are often only carried out periodically rather than continuously, which leads to inaccurate results because changes occur every day. In addition, many IT staff spend more than 100 man-days per year manually collecting inventory data from different sources, maintaining it, and transferring it to a central CMDB. This reduces the time available for important projects such as permanent optimisation.??

How to make tidying up fun - 4 steps to getting your IT under control???

In this context, how can tidying up be done quickly and even become fun because you see quick results? One approach is a model that helps to record, document, and ultimately optimise the entire IT landscape in four structured phases.???

• In phase 1, all the IT assets in your network are recorded, including system type, operating system, model, serial number, etc., and transferred to the CMDB. Through continuous scanning of the network, new objects or changes to existing objects are immediately detected and transferred to the CMDB in real-time.??
• In phase 2, network data traffic is continuously collected to capture all IT assets and the respective dependencies between applications, networks, virtualisations, and storage solutions. The result is a baseline in the form of a service map that visualises critical business services and shows which IT assets make up a business service, or which IT assets support which business service.??
• In the third phase, the effects of changes on business services are also recorded through continuous monitoring of the baseline. This enables automatic alarms to be triggered whenever unplanned or unauthorised changes are made or possible security problems arise. These can include new network traffic or service access from unidentified end devices. Such occurrences were common in the context of the pandemic, due to the implementation of bring-your-own-device policies.???
• In the fourth phase, you finally have full control. Analyses of service composition and usage allow for targeted hardware and software investment planning. Another added value: Cloud migrations or relocations become considerably easier because service composition is known in advance.???

This is how IT managers and asset managers obtain complete transparency over their entire IT landscape in the form of accurate data about their actual hardware and software inventory. They also automate time-consuming CMDB updates and create the basis for sustainable compliance fulfillment, precise licence requirement analyses, quality assurance, and service process standardisation.?

Conclusion and outlook - Automation is key?

Even if tidying up is a never-ending process at home, it can be automated to a large extent in IT organisations. Time-consuming manual data consolidation with high error rates can become a thing of the past. Additional added value is generated by the integration of discovery, IT asset management, ITSM, and software asset management.?

With a complete CMDB, IT teams can kill several birds with one stone, for example:?

• Detection of indirect use (e.g., when accessing SAP systems and SQL servers), thus improved licence requirement assessments, including for CAL (Client Access Licences)?
• Increased security, as new configuration items (CIs) are detected in real-time?
• Higher user productivity due to faster identification of incident cause?
• Easier migration to the cloud, as the dependencies between services are transparent.?

And, last but not least, deep insights into the composition of your company's IT costs based on usage. Many questions posed by management can be answered easily and without any of the usual stress. That’s what makes tidying up fun!?

Optimize Your Software Asset Management. It pays off.?