By Rob Hansen, Blazent’s Director of Professional Services
Today’s IT organizations are tasked with determining and understanding the underlying IT components that constitute a business service. It’s a daunting and ongoing task because each business service relies on a complex, constantly changing set of interacting infrastructure including servers, cloud instances, applications, databases, storage, and network devices.
It is an IT problem with severe business ramifications: failure to accurately relate the dependencies between business services and their supporting IT infrastructure results in a high number of unplanned incidents, outages, and change collisions. Today’s fast-paced, hybrid-cloud requirements create additional IT complexity and emphasize the need for rigorous change management disciplines. As changes occur within the IT infrastructure, it’s critically important that CMDB CI relationships (Configuration Item dependencies) are updated in real-time to improve operational decision-making.
It is a process that cries out for automation—and yet in most organizations, dependency mapping remains manual, labor-intensive, and fraught with problems due to process breakdowns and a lack of data validation.
Configuring CMDB CI Relationships Automatically
Blazent’s Data Intelligence Platform and Data Quality Management solution allows you to easily create and update these dependencies as they change in near real-time using your existing data sources and tool stacks. Blazent has unparalleled experience reconciling CMDB CI relationships across a variety of modern and legacy data sources, including ServiceNow Discovery, BMC Helix, Dynatrace, AWS Config, and MSP spreadsheets just to name a few.
In the example below, Blazent can be configured to establish an inherent relationship between a physical server and a data center rack by targeting the “Contains::Contained By” relationship.
Creating the CI Relationship
Blazent’s Floodlight analytic presents recently discovered CIs that are missing from the CMDB. In the example below, there are 4 new server CIs which also have a physical relationship with a rack CI. Once Blazent injects a new CI record for the server, it automatically triggers a new “contained in” relationship to be formed between Server and Rack within the CMDB.
With this CMDB CI relationship established, you’ll be able to use the Service Management system to quickly locate the exact location of the server within a data center. This is critically important information to have at your fingertips when an unplanned service outage occurs due to an offline server.
Updating Existing CI Relationships
Blazent’s Bullseye analytic presents missing or conflicting attribute values in the CMDB. It is also used to automatically update missing or changed CI relationships. Below is an example of maintaining a Storage-to-Server dependency by targeting the “Used By::Uses” relationship. Blazent will automatically update the CMDB’s CI Relationship table to properly link the Storage to the correct Server that is actively using it.
The Blazent solution provides a closed-loop integration to ensure that CMDB CI relationships are properly created and maintained throughout the IT lifecycle as infrastructure changes occur. This automated reconciliation ensures your engineering teams can ultimately make better IT decisions and safely support the business.