Rob Hansen is Blazent’s Director of Professional Services
Today’s IT organizations are tasked with determining and understanding the IT components that constitute a business service. It’s a daunting and ongoing task, because each business service relies on a complex and constantly changing set of interacting IT components—including servers, applications, databases, storage, network devices, etc.
It’s an IT problem with business ramifications: failure to relate the dependencies between business services and their supporting IT services can result in a high number of unplanned incidents, outages, and change collisions. Today’s fast-paced business requirements create additional IT complexity and emphasize the need for change management disciplines. As changes occur within the IT infrastructure it’s critically important that the relationship between CI types are updated in the CMDB to improve decision making.
It’s a process that cries out for automation—and yet in most organizations the process is manual, labor-intensive, and fraught with problems due to process breakdowns and lack of data validation.
Blazent: Configuring the CI Relationship
Blazent’s Data Intelligence Platform and Data Quality Management solution allows you to easily create and update these relationships as they change in near real-time using existing data sources and tool stacks. Blazent has unparalleled experience with a variety of data sources that contain CI-to-CI relationships, including BMC ADDM, IBM TADDM, HP DDMA/DDMI, ServiceNow Discovery, iQuate iQSonar, and MSP spreadsheets—just to name a few.
In the example below, Blazent can be configured to establish an inherent relationship between a server and rack by targeting the “Contains::Contained By” relationship.
Creating the CI Relationship
Blazent’s Floodlight analytic presents recently discovered CIs not in the CMDB. In the example below there are 4 new server CIs which also have a relationship with a rack CI. Once Blazent injects a new CI record for server, it triggers a new “contained in” relationship to be formed between Server and Rack within the CMDB.
With this 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 the CI Relationship
Blazent’s Bullseye analytic presents missing/conflict attribute values in the CMDB. It is also used to update missing or changed CI relationships. Below is an example of maintaining Storage to Server relationship by targeting the “Used By::Uses” relationship. Blazent will update the CMDB’s CI Relationship table to properly link the Storage to the correct Server that is using it.
The Blazent solution provides a closed-loop integration to ensure that CI relationships are properly created and maintained throughout the IT lifecycle as the changes occur so you can ultimately make better IT decisions and support your business or organization.