A well-maintained, accurate configuration management database (CMDB) is the cornerstone of successful IT operations, offering clarity about what’s in your environment and how it all works in tandem.
Yet, statistics indicate that only 25% of organizations are actually receiving meaningful value from their CMDB investments. This is due in large part to ever-changing IT assets and the increasing complexity of infrastructure and applications. Keeping a modern CMDB up-to-date is a near-impossible task.
If you’re among the countless IT professionals struggling to maintain an accurate and actionable CMDB, here are three things that may be holding you back and how you can overcome those obstacles once and for all.
Untrustworthy Data
Advances in technology have enabled faster growth and changes in the business landscape than ever before, but this has also lead to the proliferation of ever-increasing complexity. IPv6, for example, can assign up to 340 trillion IP addresses to devices. Enterprises are not or prepared to manage the data consequences of this large pool size. Today, enterprises struggle to manage tens of thousands of compute, storage, and network entities and devices because they can’t be sure the data can be trusted. Making sense of this data is critical to the success of any business today and to be future-ready, and CMDB accuracy is at the heart of this important task. When teams have confidence in their CMDB’s accuracy, they can use this data for both strategic decision making like undertaking a large cloud migration, as well as streamlining day-to-day tactical operations, such as responding quickly to service or application outages.
Unfortunately, most CMDBs are often always out of date, incomplete, or inaccurate, and IT teams discover this when it’s too late or when a critical issue arises – making it virtually impossible for IT to make informed decisions, deliver services efficiently, and provide an exceptional user experience. This can have a significant impact on everything from costs to governance and security to corporate brand reputation.
Manual Maintenance
Manual tracking and dependency mapping is not only incredibly time-consuming but also riddled with human error. Updates are nearly impossible to keep up with, specially in today’s complex hybrid, multi-cloud, and multi-domain environments. Manual management of a CMDB also takes valuable time away from other mission-critical initiatives that skilled IT professionals could and should be focusing on.
As a result, IT teams frequently find themselves overburdened with time-intensive manual work and still unable to keep up the ever-changing demands of CMDB maintenance. When this happens, the CMDB often takes a back seat to other IT tasks, and loses its reliability as a critical source of truth for IT.
Lack of Control and Visibility
Simply put, you can’t adequately manage what you can’t see. The primary purpose of a CMDB is to provide IT with clarity about what’s in the enterprise environment and how it all works together. Visibility over this information – both in terms of activity (what’s being pushed out and by whom) as well as IT asset inventory (new devices being tracked and managed) – is crucial to maintaining efficient management, effective troubleshooting, mitigating change management risk, accurate planning, and more.
Unfortunately, configuration items (CI) across infrastructure and applications, along with their relationships and dependencies, continue to become more complex. This results in a lack of clarity and control, which can impact everything from change implementation and incident resolution to compliance, governance and beyond.
How an Automated DDM Can Help
The right automated discovery and dependency mapping (DDM) solution can address and overcome each of these obstacles by capturing and pushing accurate and up-to-date data to your CMDB, eliminating countless hours of manual work and human error, and delivering real-time visibility to quickly troubleshoot problems, make changes with confidence, perform capacity planning, and ensure business continuity.
To learn more about how automated DDM technology can breathe new life into your CMDB, check out our webcast replay, Achieve an Always Accurate and Actionable CMDB with Best-of-Breed Discovery and Dependency Mapping.
