Who Has A Good CMDB?

[broadway]

Hello Folks,

Here goes, if you don't ask!!

I'd love to be invited to see a working CMDB (hosted within Remedy) if any of you are bold enough to admit to?


Regards
Broadway

[UKVIKING]

A couple of things

1 - Hold your breath until you turn blue. During the time oxygen has left your brain you will have vision and fantasies such as a good CMDB

2 - Remedy (Oracle ?) will ove to you show your their tool as a demo but I doubt any customer has ever had a good CMDB

The issue is defining Good CMDB
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[broadway]

Thanks Viking, why am I not surprised!

On another note although it perhaps should be added here views on creating, managing a DSL via a toolset?

[UKVIKING]

Broadway

Seriously this time on looking at a CMDB et al

I can see looking at a tool set but why Remedy ?

There are oodles of tools - the last few trade shows have had a lot of demos

If your company is looking to spend $$$$ or ££ ($/£ ratio being 2:1) on a toolset, you should ask them to provide a company

In addition, tradeshows etc shoud show you

From a company POV, I dont want some non-company person coming in and looking at my propriatary data as the CMDB would hold sensitive data

and I dont want to create a dummy one just to show some non company person.

So ask the remedy people or who ever is hustling you for a tool purchase.

I think one of the other posters posted a long disseration on what to look for .. I think it may be recent (month or 2 old)

As to the DSL.

How would I do a DSL

I would track the physical media - CD, DVD, etc.
I would track the licensing associated with the specific software
I would ensure that the annual fee / price model is appropriate for the #of concurrent users or installation
I would track the that
I would ensure that s/w would be signed in/out etc based on the environment

development world has to be treated separately and just as pedantic and focused as one can.

I would ensure that when there are s/w upgrades on O/S - system, appliances etc... are recorded / tracked even if you dont have the media on hand. Downloading to specific machines that are controlled and used as boot servers etc

beyond that,

as I am a consultant/contractor/IT w***e , you have to provide renumeration for my services to expand on the DSL stuff
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Cotswolddave]

I specialise in CM solutions which link into existing service desks such as Remedy, Peregrine, HP service desk and others - so I see lots of implementations and plans. So to answer a simple question...

If your CMDB is to be used for tracking hardware assets, I have seen a few service desk implementations where it basically works, with obvious dependence on processes.

I have not seen any implementation where the service desk is also tracking software assets for licencing. Its too complex and is often better done externally

If your CMDB is used for mapping dependencies between CIs such as servers, databases, software, services etc. then you are having to look hard to a) determine if it is an accurate representation of service construction and b) if it is used as intended when submitting changes, logging incidents. They are few and rare and the most successful ones I have seen have the minimum necessary information in them, not everything in the infrastructure.

If you try and do both, it will probably not work as it is too difficult in practice - but someone may know better. Only a few of the remedy implementations I've seen have gone beyond incident logging and service requests.

Dave