Two-state operation sharing: a service-oriented CMDB consumption scenario

In recent years, the value of CMDB in IT operations management has been gradually recognized, and the expectation of using CMDB is increasing. However, the high cost of the implementation and maintenance of the CMDB has been a pain point for the builders. So today, let's explore how to continue to drive the gradual improvement of the CMDB through consumption.

Consumption-driven is to rely on the user's consumption of income, to attract developers, sellers, gradually around the industry to build and extend its development scope. For example, the consumption mode of online shopping has driven the booming of e-commerce, and the new mode of life has driven the development of functional home. Drawing on this idea, we might as well use the cost of the CMDB to drive managers and users to pay more attention to the configuration management, so that they can invest the appropriate costs to maintain the accuracy and completeness of the CMDB.

Here, we analyze the consumption scenarios of the CMDB from three aspects. One is to help enterprises achieve the standardization of Information management, the second is to achieve automated and efficient business impact analysis, third, to support the monitoring and environmental management.

First, standardized information management

Unified configuration information management platform, solve the configuration information of a large number of scattered, duplicate, multi-management of the dilemma, we have the ability to accurately, standard query and management of assets and configuration of the platform, but also realize the asset allocation information legal compliance maintenance.

At the same time, we solve the previous departments, the system of the same configuration information naming, recording, filling the specification inconsistency, for information centralized analysis and statistics to bring a lot of convenience, reduce the communication costs; each object (CI) has a unique profile that tells us what's going on in the past and now (events, issues , change) or what it looks like (attributes), what it affects, and how it affects (relationships), changes the pattern of records that only configuration information does not have a history of configuration, which fundamentally alters the scope and quality of the configuration information.

Figure 1 Configuration change history traceable

Second, the impact of automated business analysis

Business Service-based management is a leap in any system from simple to complex changes in IT management, that is, from the original "IT Infrastructure management" as the center to the "Business services" as the center of the transformation, the focus of management from simply consider IT resources good and bad, Transfer to the care of the business system to provide continuous service capability.

This enhancement requires that we be able to correlate from the underlying infrastructure to the upper-level business services based on an accurate and complete configuration management model, so that it can quickly and automatically analyze the impact of a failure or change on the business in the event of a failure or change.

Figure 2 Business impact analysis of faults

As can be seen, when a certain resource alarm, through the model relationship of the CMDB, can pass through the vast sea of equipment, components, services, conduction analysis of this alarm impact of the business, this scenario will be a failure of the level of judgment, resource allocation decision-making and business recovery program play a significant role in supporting.

Figure 3 Business impact analysis for changes

In the same way, before we implement a change, we are often trapped in how to accurately identify which business the change will affect, and what level of failure will result if the change fails or the problem arises, which will directly affect the level of change, the approval process, the implementation time, and the implementation of resource decisions.

From this we can see that the CMDB model will solve this problem effectively, and through the upward tracing of the change point of the equipment component, the analysis of the business impact is realized, and the efficiency and accuracy of change management are supported.

III. support for monitoring and environmental management

The use of the CMDB also provides support for routine monitoring and management. First, the CMDB can be all the IT resources of the unified management, the first time to obtain the node information (manual input, automatic discovery, system integration acquisition, etc.), according to the CI status changes, identify the new node. In the case of automatic operation and maintenance platform to support automatic monitoring configuration, it can trigger the auto-deploy action, which can generate the work order notification for the responsible person in manual way. In this way, we can achieve the full coverage of the monitoring object and add new items in a timely manner.

Figure 4 Timing diagram for monitoring configuration using CMDB

Further, we can assist in the analysis and management of various environmental consistency through the use of the CMDB. Usually the information environment of enterprise includes development test environment, production environment, disaster preparation environment and so on. Checking and maintaining the configuration consistency of different environments is critical to testing and recovering from disaster recovery efforts. We may wish to help achieve this management requirement by consuming CMDB data.

We can pre-set the corresponding rules in the system, the same system in different environment configuration item information and correlation relationship, identify the configuration differences within the scope, remind the management to verify the repair, and the relevant interface to prompt. Of course, this requires a comparison of the rules to be set, for testing or disaster preparedness for different environments, the granularity and severity of the comparison should be different. At the same time, this alignment can be set to run periodically to maintain consistent management of the environment.

Figure 5 Using the CMDB to achieve an environmental consistency management timing diagram

In conclusion, we can see that the effective consumption of CMDB has solved many problems in the past operation and maintenance management, and brought the visible business value.

PostScript: Through consumption to drive the construction and maintenance of the CMDB, managers can be more confident in their investment, but also through the application of these scenarios, let ordinary ops people recognize their value, thus establishing the use of CMDB habits and intentions. Broad-pass software based on many years of operation and maintenance practice, will be introduced to the CMDB as the core of agile operation and maintenance of good text, please look forward to ~ ~

Author profile: Shingi, specializing in IT operations and maintenance services management, has been in the Ministry of Information Technology department for more than more than 10 years, committed to operation and maintenance services management system construction, implementation and landing, proficient in ITIL, ISO20000 management. Currently serving the Cloud software: adhering to the DevOps philosophy, from monitoring, to application experience, to automated continuous delivery.

Two-state operation sharing: a service-oriented CMDB consumption scenario