Keeping CMDB data up to date

[lozica]

Does anyone have a good mechanism for keping the data in the CMDB up to date.
I work in a large company the has a lot of changes, and as it happens some of the changes are done without the knowledge of the Change Management.

Can anyone tell me if they have any knowledge how to establih a CMDB thet will have mechanisms to keep CMDB up to date.

Thanks in advance

[davyjimjam]

This issue highlights a deficiency in your Change, Release and Configuration Management processes.

For Change Management to work efficiently, it should interface with the two other processes, both of which have activities to update the CMDB within them. Configuration Managment includes the Control, Status Accounting and Verification Audit activities - all fundamental to ensuring the concurrency of the CMDB and the CI's contained within it.

Although tools can be purchased to enable this (LANDesk for example), this does solve your fundamental issues of process, and ultimately, people.

It may be necessary to reobtain managerial and operational staff buy-in to adhere to the processes, which may in turn be a more cost effective solution.

[Guerino1]

Iozica,

Have you tried automating your build and deployment solutions to post back to your CMDB? I've found that if changes are allowed to be deployed, manually, then users will rarely, if ever, post their work back to the CMDB, after the work is done. However, if you use fully automated deployment solutions that post back to your CMDB, stating who deployed, when, where, what, etc. then you at least have an audit trail. The other option is to have them register their changes, as per ITIL's reference to "Requests for Change", before they actually get approval to perform the work.

Regards,
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[Edited by Admin to remove link]

[rjp]

One of the key tasks of Configuration Management is the regular auditing of the CMDB against the actual environment.

(I expect this is meant to lead to some 'officail wrist slapping' - but of course that requires management to take CMDB integrity seriously).

There is not tool (I know of) on the market good enough to make auditing undecessary.

Configuration management is really an information management discipline only - it is actually farily simple, but what it does require is dilligence, attention to detail, and above all - resources. If you are not auditing - it's abit like a plane without wings.

Bear in mind audits based on statistical sampling techniques may be adequate.

[Guerino1]

Try tools like AT&T Nmake, which is open source, to control your builds and deployments. It collects all target/dependency information to map out your configurations for your builds and deployements (with some work by you to extract the data from its data structures). If you build what they call "operators" (or what we might refer to as templates) that dump these details to your CMDB, on execution of the templates, then they will keep the history & auditing details in place, automatically.

Regards,
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[Edited by Admin to remove link]