Improving IT Service Management with a Federated CMDB

Successful service and support organizations provide a responsive and effective service to quickly restore capacity in the event of failures and outages. Key to their success is access to a complete picture of the infrastructure they support, recorded in terms relevant to the organizational requirements.

Accurate Configuration Item (CI) information is essential to providing responsive service and support and assists Service Desk technicians in assessing the impact of a service failure against current service level targets. However, for some environments hardware and software information may be stored in multiple repositories. Many organizations have distributed CI information in external management tools across multiple domains, in asset management and event management applications. These tools may capture different information for the same CI.

LiveTime provides an IT service view of this disparate CI information within its federated CMDB. This allows service organizations to view information from independent sources for a more holistic view of the IT infrastructure and their relationships. LiveTime’s configurable templates enable CI information from different sources to be combined and recorded in terms relevant to specific business and service requirements.

All this is easily achieved using LiveTime’s Asset Management Integration Engine (AMIE), which uses XML descriptor files embedded within the application to connect to foreign hosts. Based on the details entered in AMIE, asset management data is transferred to LiveTime’s Staging area where it is assessed against the Category Maps and merged into a CI in LiveTime’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Any future AMIE synchs update the CIs directly or generate a Change Request.

This capability demonstrates LiveTime’s commitment to open standards and interoperability, which results in a federated real time, business IT service view of the CMDB, with specific CI details being drawn from several external sources. This provides technicians with visibility into any recent changes made to CIs, which is critical when diagnosing the root cause of an incident or problem.