Pre-Con Ed: Make Better Sense out of the World of CMDB and Change Management

Pre-Con Ed: Make Better Sense out
of the World of CMDB and Change
Management
John Weston
Sr. Principal Consultant, Service Management — CA Technologies
AMX29E
AGILE MANAGEMENT

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For Informational Purposes Only
© 2016 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks referenced herein belong to their respective companies.
The content provided in this CA World 2016 presentation is intended for informational purposes only and does not
form any type of warranty. The information provided by a CA partner and/or CA customer has not been reviewed for
accuracy by CA.
Terms of this Presentation

Agenda
INTRODUCTION
CMDB DEPLOYMENT GUIDELINES
ADVANCED CMDB FUNCTIONS
CHANGE AND CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
1
2
3
4

CMDB Deployment Guidelines

Configuration Management
 A service is any system, process, access or other capability that IT
provides its customers according to established expectations of
availability and quality.
 Configuration Items (CIs) are entities—usually subject to Change
Management—that are vital to the delivery of a defined service, including
– physical servers
– VMs
– applications
 Configuration Management is the process responsible for discovering and
maintaining baseline definitions of services, CIs, and CI relationships.
Definitions

Configuration Management
 Establish CI inventory
 Create and manage CI and Service relationships and dependencies
 Manage CI and Service configuration baselines
 Support Root Cause Analysis and Change Impact Analysis
 Provide change detection and configuration drift analysis
 Drive Continuous Service Improvement for CI and Service
configurations through tolerance mapping
Functions and Benefits

General Guidelines for the CMDB
 Not every asset is a CI and not every CI is an asset. Here is a good guideline for
what constitutes a CI: is it subject to your Change Management policies?
 Assets can be entered into the Management Database (MDB) and give benefits to
Incident, Problem, and Change Management.
 Do not feel like you must discover everything in order to have a useful CMDB.
– You don’t necessarily need all possible attributes for a given CI
– You don’t need to model all CIs and Services in your infrastructure
 Keep change discovery and configuration remediation in the Management Data
Repositories (MDRs).
 Take a look at CA Configuration Automation. You probably have an entitlement to
it through CA Service Desk Manager.

How Your Customers View IT
Service
End
Users
Identity
Manager
Firewall
Applications
Switch
Load
Balancer Portal
SAP
PSFT
Siebel
Web Services
3rd Party
applications
Web
Servers
Databases
Router
Mainframe
DatabaseThe end user doesn’t care about any of this

Defining Services
 Services are often made
up of many layers
 Connecting layers is
what makes Services
useful but complicated
 We need to find these
connections to navigate
through the layers

Service Hierarchies
Service
Layer
Service
Subset
Layer
System
Layer
Logical
Host
Layer
Physical
Host
Layer
Service
Sub-Service
Logical
Partition
Computer
Hardware
Storage
Hardware
Storage
LUN
Network
Zone
Firewall
Hardware
Network
Hardware
System

Service
Layer
Service
Subset
Layer
System
Layer
Logical
Host
Layer
Physical
Host
Layer
Peer-to-Peer Relationships
Storage
Hardware
Network
Hardware
Storage
LUN
Network
Zone
Firewall
Hardware
Service
Sub-Service
Computer
Hardware
System
Logical
Partition
Peer-to-Peer relationships should be considered carefully
because the more “sideways” steps you take the more
unclear it is if a potential dependency exists.
Dependency? Dependency? Dependency? Dependency?

Service Structure Guidelines
Select the Appropriate Structure
Service Mgt = Hierarchy
System Mgt =
Technology-to-Technology
Cost Mgt =
Technology-to-Cost/Contract
Add / Remove hierarchy
layers as required
+
Technology layers can be
skipped if inappropriate
Start Simple….
Then build complexity…
Services, Systems & Computers
Adding Storage, Networks, etc..

CI Relationship Guidelines
 Start with the out-of-the-box CI relationships
 Define Provider-Dependent relationships between two
Service layers and between CI Families in each Layer
 Modify the CMDB Visualizer relationship formatting
– Assign a different color to each Relationship Type
– Keep Black the peer-to-peer Relationship Types within a layer
– Keep in mind that peer-to-peer relationships will not show up
in the Visualizer when you use the Impact Analysis and Root Cause
Analysis filters

Advanced CMDB Functions

Transaction Work Area

Transaction Work Area (TWA)
 The TWA is a staging area for storing, reviewing, and
modifying CI and CI relationship transactions before importing
them into the CMDB proper.
 Primary uses
– Avoid creating multiple records for what is actually one CI
– Avoid creating one record for what are actually multiple CIs
– Transform CI data to conform with CMDB policies, for example where
multiple MDRs have different naming conventions

The TWA Process
 Load CI and CI relationship data into the TWA. Note that
reconciliation is not attempted at this point. Sources:
– The web interface
– GRLoader utility with the -lttwa (load into initial state) or -lttwar (load
into ready state) options
– Native SQL queries
 Modify the data as needed, using the Service Desk web
interface or native SQL queries.
From Discovery Source to the TWA

The TWA Process
 Load data from the TWA into the CMDB using the
GRLoader utility with the -lftwa (load transactions from TWA)
or -lftwai (load from TWA and inactivate successful
transactions) options
From the TWA to the CMDB

Configuration Item Reconciliation

Configuration Item (CI) Reconciliation
 Purpose: assign imported CI attributes to
existing CIs where appropriate, and avoid
creating duplicates. Name = server1
Mac address =
11:11:11:11:11
Name = server1
Mac address =
22:22:22:22:22
Name = server1
Questions about these three imported CIs:
How many servers should we now have in the CMDB?
How do we determine the “surviving” CI or CIs?
What happens to eliminated duplicates?

Reconciliation Priorities
 ID (ca_owned_resource uuid)
 Federated Data
– Federated Asset ID
– MDR Name
– MDR Class
 Reconciliation attributes
– Name
– Serial Number
– Asset Number
– System Name
– DNS Name
– MAC Address

Reconciliation Rules
Name
Serial
Number
Asset
Number
System
Name DNS Name
MAC
Address Result
Unique Null Null Null Null Null CI created
Null Unique Null Null Null Null CI created
Null Null Unique Null Null Null CI created
Null Null Null Unique Null Null CI created
Null Null Null Null Unique Null CI created
Null Null Null Null Null Unique CI created
Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Unique Duplicate Duplicate CI created
Unique Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Recognized as duplicate CI
Null Null Null Null Unique Unique CI created
Null Null Null Null Duplicate Unique Recognized as duplicate CI
Null Null Null Null Unique Duplicate Recognized as duplicate CI
Duplicate Duplicate Unique Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate CI created
Duplicate Unique Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate CI created
Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Unique Recognized as duplicate CI
Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Unique Duplicate Recognized as duplicate CI
Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Duplicate Unique Unique Recognized as duplicate CI

Ambiguous Configuration Items

Ambiguous CIs
 An ambiguous CI is one that may be a duplicate.
 A CI’s ambiguity index measures its potential for being a duplicate.
It is a count of all of the other CI attributes that match any of its
reconciliation attributes.
– It’s a simple sum of the counts of “CIs with matching name,” “CIs with matching serial
number,” etc.
– Example: Ambiguity Index 2 means that there are two matching attributes in the CMDB,
but they might be from the same CI.
 Calculate the ambiguity index by running the cmdb_update_ambiguity
command.
– Example: cmdb_update_ambiguity - m all - d MSSQL - u ServiceDesk - p
sdmpassword -s sdmserver1 –level info

Dealing with Ambiguous CIs
 Identify them
– Scoreboard query
– Administration tab
– Reconciliation tab on a particular CI record
 Resolve them
– Do nothing or modify the offending CI attributes
– Mark as not ambiguous: removes the CI from lists of ambiguous CIs
– Inactivate the ambiguous CI: removes the CI from normal CI lists
– Supersede: a good option if one or more MDRs will continue to send
updates of the CI in question

Superseded Configuration Items

Superseded CIs
 As we saw previously, superseded CIs are sometimes created
when resolving ambiguous CIs
 Incoming updates to a superseded CI are redirected to the
superseding CI

Should You Supersede This CI?
 For one-off updates it is better to fix input data than to supersede a CI.
Superseding generally will be used where you have little control over
incoming transactions.
 Superseded CIs are flagged as inactive and by default cannot be updated
via the web UI.
 Since a superseded CI will not be updated its attributes and other data are
allowed to atrophy.
 If you supersede a superseding CI then all updates will be redirected to the
higher superseding CI, as expected.
Some Considerations

GRLoader

Examples of GRLoader Commands
 cmdb_update_ambiguity -m all -d MSSQL -u username -p
password -s server -level info — Runs an ambiguity check
 grloader -u username -p password -s
http://localhost:8080 -i spreadsheet.xlsx –lttwa —
Loads from an Excel spreadsheet into the TWA
http://localhost:8080 -i spreadsheet.xlsx –a —
Allows updates from a spreadsheet directly to the CMDB
http://localhost:8080 -sc Windows —
Lists attributes of the specified class (in this case the Windows class).

GRLoader Considerations
 A number of CI attributes are validated against values from tables
rather than being free text entry fields. The import must have valid
values for these fields:
– audit_userid
– bm_rep
– bm_status
– class
– company_bought_for_uuid
– contact_1
– contact_2
– contact_3
– delete_flag
– department
– expense_code
– family
– location
– manufacturer
– model
– operating_system
– org_bought_for_uuid
– priority
– repair_org
– resource_contact
– resource_owner_uuid
– service_org
– service_type
– status
– supplier
– vendor_repair
– vendor_restore

Change and Configuration Management

Combining the Two Disciplines

Change Management
 The process of managing updates to IT infrastructure
 Provides a control structure to authorize changes
 Defines clear roles and responsibilities to implement changes
 Optimized Change Management results in:
– Fewer incidents and problems
– Swifter resolution of problems when they do occur
– Efficient fulfillment of strategic improvement requests

Where Does the CMDB Come In?
 Track configuration changes
against baselines and/or
gold standards
 Detect and correct configuration
drift before it impacts availability
or performance of applications
or services
 Ensure managed servers are
updated to the latest
configuration specifications
Detection of
Configuration
Error
Service
Incident
Opened
System
Isolation /
Quarantine
Analysis /
Known Error
Change
Request
Opened
Change
Request
Approved
Change
Deployed
Compliance
Verified

Configuration Audit and Control Facility

Configuration Audit and Control Facility (CACF)
 The CACF bridges Change Management and Configuration
Management. It can also leverage discovery solutions.
 Goals of the CACF
– Allow for identification of CI attributes that will be updated as part of a
Change Order.
– Verify successful implementation of the attribute updates.
– Ultimately, ensure that the CMDB’s accuracy is maintained.

CACF Roles and Responsibilities
 CMDB Administrator
– Defines managed CI attributes.
– Defines the policies for updating managed attributes.
 What to do with “rogue” updates (i.e., those not associated with a Change Order)
 Which MDRs are authorized to update which attributes
– Defines which Change statuses reflect editable Changes and which statuses
represent verification states.
 Change Analyst
– Specifies the attributes that will be updated in a particular Change.
– For each attribute, indicates whether the update will be verified and
in which way.

How Change Verification Works
 Change Order must be in a Verification in Progress state
 An update to the relevant CI is loaded via the web interface, GRLoader, or
web services API.
 Based on the CACF verification policy for this update one or more of the
following actions will be taken:
– The update is accepted, and the CI is updated
– The update is deferred to the TWA so that a user can assess it
– An Incident is created
– The update is rejected
 The CA Service Management wiki has great recommendations on setting
up CACF and especially Change verification.

Change Verification Policies
 Allow Update Only if Matches Change Specification:
depending on the incoming update CACF will either verify the
update and close the Change Order or fail the verification.
 Set After Change Verified: closing the Change Order
automatically updates the CI attribute to the planned value.
 Accept the Planned Value: analyst manually confirms the
accuracy of the planned value and accepts it, which updates
the CI.
Some Examples

Results
While Configuration Management touches on many aspects of IT in one way or
another, its link to and dependence on Change Management is particularly
important. In today’s session we have learned about some of the CA Service Desk
Manager CMDB capabilities. We have also discussed the sorts of pitfalls and
opportunities to watch for when preparing to deploy Configuration Management.
You can see benefits from your initial forays into Configuration Management,
but the discipline also rewards an iterative approach of continual improvement.
Summary
A Few Words to Review

Recommended Sessions
SESSION # TITLE DATE/TIME
AMX121S
Case Study: Using Process Automation in CA Service
Catalog to Deliver Services Faster
11/16/2016 at 3:45 pm
AMX18S
Slaying the Dragons of Agile, DevOps and ITSM
Information Flow
11/16/2016 at 4:30 pm
AMX10S
Case Study: ITSM Process Automation at Cerner: We’re
all in!
11/17/2016 at 3:00 pm

Must See Demos
Service Desk
and Support
Analyst xFlow
Experience
Software and
Hardware Asset
Management
Request
Management
and Self-service
Management
Insights –
Reporting and
Dashboards

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Editor's Notes