Configuration Management
Manage the Inventory of and Relationships between Configuration Items
This discipline accounts for all IT assets and configurations. It provides accurate information on configurations, including the relationship between configuration items, and verifies configuration records against the infrastructure. The core component of Configuration Management is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which retains all of this information for use by the other disciplines.
Implementing Configuration Management
CMDB is a leading topic of discussion among ITIL practitioners, because of its central role in supporting other disciplines and the level of difficulty that it introduces into an ITIL/ITSM deployment. The current ITIL guidance seems to be more applicable to a mainframe environment, where Configuration Management is more centralized and, therefore, more easily accomplished. In large distributed environments, the challenge of building and maintaining an accurate CMDB becomes exponentially more difficult.
An emerging solution to this challenge is the concept of a “Federated” or virtual CMDB, which leverages the numerous databases that already exist in most IT organizations, collecting metadata on which CIs the databases contain, but does not retain the detailed data specific to individual CIs. Examples of the types of databases that could be leveraged include asset or financial management systems, network administration tools or systems management tools such as the AppManager QDB.
NetIQ also provides configuration and vulnerability management tools, which support additional ITIL requirements for Configuration Management. NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager enables organizations to define service-oriented baselines and measure compliance to those baselines as described in the Configuration Management chapter in the ITIL Service Support book (section 7.3.6). Service-oriented baselines are configuration standards that are unique to a given business or technical service. Leveraging these baselines, the product enables Configuration Management to quickly identify exceptions that are likely to cause performance problems or introduce security-related risks.
A Delta Report from NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager can identify any attribute that is different between two systems.
NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager also checks against the accuracy of the CMDB by scanning for new CIs and reporting changes to existing CIs. It can inventory applications installed, services running, user accounts, files and directories, service packs and patches, policy settings, and other configuration-oriented attributes of a server. This is useful information for other ITIL disciplines such as Change Management, where it can enable confirmation of the currency of Requests for Change (RFCs).
Key Features
- Perform automated discovery of configuration items within the environment using agent-based or agent-less technology to understand what assets exist.
- Establish Configuration Baselines by setting gold standards or point-in-time snapshots, allowing delta reports between different times or across different systems. This facilitates troubleshooting, answering the “what has changed” question when incidents occur and is useful for determining the readiness of disaster recovery sites as they relate to currency with production systems.
- Automatic distribution of reports via email ensures that stakeholders are working from current configuration information.
- Detailed compliance information such as up-to-date patch levels, descriptions, risks, and remedies for each configuration included in assessment templates and reports.
- Asset groups and sub-groups based on organizational needs.
