Context

IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) enables automated discovery and management of business-critical configuration items (CIs) including hardware, software and their inter-relationships. Customers are able to audit and enforce change control over their CIs using the included best practices based change and configuration management processes. These processes ensure that the right individuals and information are involved as an activity moves from start to finish. The implementation of process management is a fundamental step in providing the ability to define the interaction of CCDMB with discovery tools, to identify the roles and set policies around the information contained in CCMDB.

CCMDB is built on an open, standards-based platform that enables customization of data and processes to meet specific customer IT service management needs. Using CCMDB as the foundation for integrating their IT processes, customers can take advantage of additional IBM Service Management offerings such as Release Process Manager. Each of these ITIL®-aligned process managers runs on top of the CCMDB enabling customers to take full control of their IT processes.

Details

IBM Tivoli CCMDB includes a rich set of features that are ready for you to use as is:

Discovery – The native discovery capability for the CCMDB provides complete and detailed topology maps of business applications and their supporting infrastructure, including hardware, software, networks, cross-tier dependencies, run-time configuration values, and complete change history. By leveraging the automated discovery and maintenance of these application maps, customers can fully understand the impact of incidents or changes to their IT environment and dramatically lower the business risks of service failures and inconsistencies.

Data Integration – CCMDB also provides a discovery library methodology to import data from various operational management product (OMP) repositories into CCMDB. The discovery library is based on an XML specification called Identification Markup Language (IDML). IDML allows customers to take data from virtually any source and bring that data into the CCMDB. IBM will be providing discovery library adapters (DLAs) for many IBM and third-party OMP products.

Data Reconciliation – Data stored in CCMDB can come from a variety of sources, some of which have their own unique identities for the same CI. The CCMDB relies on a built-in reconciliation engine that applies identification rules to detect duplicate identities and stores only one copy of the CI in the CCMDB. Each CI type has one or more identification rules.

Data Federation – It is not necessary to store all information about a CI in the CCMDB. In cases where noncritical attributes of a CI have to be occasionally viewed, the CCMDB provides federation capabilities to fetch the data on demand from various sources. These federated attributes, once configured by an administrator, can be transparently accessed as often as needed.

Authorized CI Management – CCMDB enables desired-state management by allowing authorized versions of CIs to be created which specify the aspects of the CI (attributes and relationships to other CIs) that are to be tightly controlled. Authorized CIs can be created by promoting Actual CIs, or an Authorized CI template can be used to promote a large number of CIs to authorized in a single action when all should have the same authorized definition.

CI Lifecycle Management – Lifecycle state transition graphs can be created to manage the valid states that an Authorized CI can be in, as well as the valid transitions from one state to another. Particular states can be defined as protected states, which require that the proper controls are placed around changes to Authorized CIs that are in those states.

CI Control – When changes are made to Authorized CIs that are in a protected state, CCMDB enforces that a valid RFC is used to make the change. This provides control over Authorized CI changes according to the policies defined as well as the recordkeeping necessary for change auditing and other facets like SOX compliance.

CI Auditing – CI audits can be performed with CCMDB to detect variances between the Authorized CI (desired configuration) and the Actual CI (what is actually in the environment). Remediation actions such as opening an RFC can be taken directly from the audit results to rectify the variances. This capability enables customers to enforce configuration policies and easily detect variances against those policies, allowing them to quickly isolate incidents and proactively manage their IT environment.

Change and Configuration Management processes – The CCMDB includes best-practice flows for these processes. The processes operate on the authorized versions of the CIs so that the focus can be on the CIs that have been deemed critical to the business. Customers can enforce change control over the CIs by leveraging the built-in Change Management process. The change management capability allows customers to create requests for change (RFC), accept and categorize the changes, assess the impacts of RFCs on the infrastructure using the standardized data available in the CMDB, approve, schedule and coordinate the implementation of the RFC.

Process Customization – Recognizing that many customers have well documented and functioning processes today, the CCMDB processes are easily configurable at a variety of levels. For example administrators can create new process templates for specific RFC types and add or delete activities and tasks from an existing process template.

Obtaining more information

For additional information, contact your IBM Tivoli representative or read the Web page:

IBM Tivoli CCMDB
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/features/it-serv-mgmt/welcome/itsm-platform.html