Preetham, I hope all is well at GEHC.
1. The CA CMDB and the SD CMDB are EXACTLY the same technology. When CA started creating CMDB capabilities, we sold it as a separate technology. So those with Service Desk could add the CA CMDB to the product. With CA Service Desk Manager, it is included. But, they have all the same capabilities.
2. A CMDB is used to link supporting Configuration Items (CIs) to the business services they are supporting. Such as: Servers, Routers, Switches, Applications, Databases, etc. The relationship between these components help with understanding the potential impact of a pending change, as well as in an outage (Incident) situation, what the Root Cause could be. For more information on the CMDB look in the Documentation at the CMDB tech reference guide.
Start Smart Philosophy:
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Select 1 Business Service to map the supporting CIs
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Determine the top 30-60 CIs that you know about that support this Business Service
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Classify each of these CIs into the proper Service Desk Manager Class/Family
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Determine by CI family which attributes are CRITICAL to track (no more than 6-10 per family)
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Determine by CI family which relationship are CRITICAL to track (no more than 6-10 per family)
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Determine by attribute and relationship if there are discovery technologies that can be considered a trusted source (MDR – Management Data Repository) of information for the attribute or relationship (only one trusted source per attribute or relationship)
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Setup the MDR for each attribute and or relationship
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Pull the information into the repository for that single business service for only those supporting CIs above into the Transaction Work Area
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Validate that the CIs, attributes and relationships look as anticipated; if not, fix the information at the MDR/trusted source; if it is move it into the live CMDB
• Find the next Business Service and begin again (this will be faster since you have already mapped out many critical CI attributes and relationships, as well as the supporting MDR to provide the information by family
Hope this helps.
Randal Locke
The ITIL "Texas Ranger"
VP - Customer Lifecycle Solutions
CA Technologies
[color=#f00101]ADMIN:[color] Kyle_R. 2013-4-12. Flagging Randal's reply as the solution.