Overcoming the Challenge of CMDB Inaccuracy

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• Single “source of truth” about your IT environment

• Make changes easier to plan with fewer unintended consequences

• Resolve issues faster

• Make compliance reporting easier

• And more…

The Promised Value of a CMDB

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So why aren’t CMDBs used?

In Our Experience…

• Many team members don’t want to use the CMDB(s) “It’s not up to date”

“It’s not accurate”

“It’s incomplete

• And IT leaders are reluctant to “start over” because they expect the same result

• Others haven’t implemented a CMDB because they’ve heard the horror stories from their peers

• What about: Discovery tools to populate the CMDB?

Forcing all changes through a formal change process that updates the CMDB?

Creating a CMDB “data cleansing team”?

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“The once-promising configuration management database (CMDB) has failed — but the original CMDB promise has not.

To benefit from trends such as automation, cloud computing, DevOps, and big data, infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need trustworthy information more than ever.”

- Glenn O’Donnell, “Reinvent the necessary but obsolete

CMDB,” Forrester Research

A CMDB Your Teams Can Trust

ITinvolve:

Includes all your critical dependency information (beyond just config data)

Is accurate and trusted, because the information is continuously peer reviewed

Is complete, because your experts easily fill in missing information in real-time as part of their daily work

Provides rich visualization tailored to the personalized views teams and individual IT professionals need

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"We looked at some of the big vendor CMDB packages but they were overkill and would have required additional resources just to keep them up to date."

– Matt Estes, Director of Strategic Initiatives

Tax Audit.com

Working With Multiple CMDBs

ITinvolve federates information from other CMDBs and data sources, and combines this information with crowd sourcing of your expert team members to truly give you one source of truth about your environment.

We can even work with your existing CMDBs bi-directionally, so their accuracy and completeness is enhanced.

A CMDB Your Teams Will Use

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6 Steps to a CMDB That’s Accurate and Trusted

① Leverage the configuration data you already have (whether that’s an existing CMDB, discovery tools, an asset management tool, spreadsheets, etc.)

② Bring that information together visually in one place (either importing or federating the details as necessary)

③ Leverage modern social collaboration principles to follow and peer review your existing data – so it’s validated and trusted

④ Fill in the gaps in your existing data with what’s known by your experts (using social collaboration and intuitive visualization of relationships and dependencies)

⑤ Bring experts together to assess change risk, leverage your CMDB and empower them to correct bad information or fill in gaps in real-time

⑥ Tie in your auto-discovery data on an ongoing basis to validate changes were actually executed as planned

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