It configuration management

If you don't know what's in your IT environment, don't expect to control, maintain, and improve them, so configuration management implementation is a key to IT service management. The implementation of configuration management is generally divided into three steps: Defining the process of configuration management, defining configuration management roles and responsibilities, and defining configuration item objects.

The IT department faces huge challenges in delivering highly reliable IT services. Implementing IT service management requires a good Configuration management strategy First: If you don't know what's in your IT environment, don't expect to control, maintain, and improve them.

Based on the ITIL Service Support manual, the goal of configuration management is to implement all of the Organization's IT assets and configurations and their associated services, provide accurate configuration information and configuration-related documentation to support all other service management processes, and provide a solid foundation for event management, problem management, change management, and release management. Verify the correctness of the infrastructure based on the configuration record and correct any exceptions.

When these goals are reached, your organization will be able to experience the benefits of significant and measurable IT services.

how to implement effectively.

The implementation of configuration management is generally divided into the following three steps:

1, define the process of configuration management:

The configuration management process starts with an initial planning and construction step, including creating a configuration Management database (CMDB). After initialization, the process focuses on the day-to-day basis of the authentication and maintenance configuration management data model, as well as the maintenance of configuration data. The process is also responsible for generating reports for configuration information, and for periodic audits.

2. Define configuration management roles and responsibilities

According to ITIL best practices, there are 4 important roles in configuration management, as shown in table 1, where you need to define their corresponding responsibilities in detail for each role. At the same time, each employee of the enterprise must be required to identify the roles and responsibilities that they have in participating in and executing the configuration management process.

3. Define configuration item objects

All components that make up the IT infrastructure are called configuration items (CIs). Defining a configuration item object requires that we identify several features that a configuration item should have: that it is necessary to provide the service, that it is clearly identifiable, that it may be changed, and that it must be managed.

In addition, you must explicitly define the scope and verbosity of the configuration items that you need to manage in order to accurately gather the configuration item information that you need.

The situation is different for each enterprise, the requirements for management are not the same, and the definition of the configuration items that need to be managed is different, and the key to how to effectively implement configuration management is to define the configuration items and collect their relevant information accurately.

a case

A bank began implementing a large concentration of data center project in 2004. The data center has the important task of providing IT services to the country-facing backstage and front desk. In 2005, all branches of the bank's operations were transplanted into data center operations. After a large concentration, high quality IT service is a matter of great concern to top management, because it greatly affects its corporate image, core competence and market share.

To this end, the bank plans to improve the management of data centers for three years, while requiring that all ITIL service support modules be in place after the first phase of the goal (including help desk, incident management, problem management, change management, configuration management, and release management).

two main categories of scope Division

In implementing configuration management, the project defines the configuration management scope and configuration item (including the definition of data structure and association relationship) according to the customer's actual situation and requirements.

Configuration management scope includes the scope and scope of two categories, the scope of which is divided into software, hardware and it documents three categories, ranging from building facilities, all non-it-related documents, all non-it-related systems, such as Table 2.

The definition of scope is based on the principle that it should be aligned with the scope of the event/issue/change management.

Defining Configuration Items

The specific definition of a configuration item includes the definition of a data structure and associated relationships.

In order to minimize changes to the configuration database structure in the future, each configuration item for the configuration database structure is divided into "basic properties", "Specific properties", "Relationships", and "associated items" four parts:

Public properties: Used to store attributes that are usually available for each configuration item, such as serial numbers, branding, vendors, and so on.

Proprietary properties: Used to hold properties specific to this configuration item, for example, a server's specific properties can be CPU, memory, and so on, and database specific properties can be database bits, archive methods, and so on.

Relationship: Represents the physical relationship between this configuration item and other configuration items, and in IT service management, four relationships are used to describe the physical relationships of each configuration item: Belong, include, correspond, and connect.

Associated item: Used to hold event/issue/change information associated with this configuration item.

The Configuration Management database data model is defined as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1 Definition of the configuration Management database data model

In terms of the correlation of configuration items, configuration management is primarily for problem diagnosis and change assessment, the ability to consider whether a configuration item (CI) that is directly connected to a configuration item (CI) is affected, and therefore the "relationship between CI" shown in the configuration management database is the CI item that is adjacent to and connected to the CI.

It is suggested that CI should be divided into two aspects of physics and logic, Hostname (logical host), operating system and database are all logical levels, while the physical devices such as server and storage are physical.

The relationships between CI are: Belong, include, peer (connect or correspond), as shown in Figure 2 and table 2.

Figure 2 Relationship between configuration items (CI)

Based on the above principles, it is possible to use the method shown in Figure 3 to clearly describe the relationship between CI items within the scope of management.

Figure 3 Relationship between CI in management scope