How do you handle CIs environments?

[Anon Anon]

We are having problems in our CMDB's architecture - especially when it comes to take different approaches in change, incident or request management - due to the way we handle the "environment" information of a specific CI.

Today, we have come to an incredible number of seven environments (production, development, test, lab, training, client approval and external development). And each one have different service levels (SLAs and OLAs), change evaluation criteria and so on.

To help me find a better way to handle this, I would like to ask if our community members have similar issues.

So, if you can, please tell me how do you identify a CI environment (which attribute or other field holds this information) and what is your approach about having non-production-CIs information (relationships, mainly) in the CMDB.

Any comment about this question will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you very much!

 

Mauro

[System]

Hi All,

 

Any thoughts here for Mauro?

 

Thanks!

Chris

[Anon Anon]

Mauro,

We have been looking in to managing the different environments as well for exactly the same reasons.  The action that has been proposed is to create a custom table for the environments and then put a field in the proper family CI forms with a dropdown.   Having the proper amount or enough relationships to gauge risk and impact is a constant struggle so the more the merrier!  One challenge is that the definition of production/non-production cannot be agreed upon.  Many UAT or training environments may use a copy of production data, may connect to production LDAP sources, may be on the production network, and depending on the vendor and licensing the non-production environment may just be another instance alongside production on the same appliance or server etc. so relationships that cross environments can help in avoiding production changes impacting non-production environments.   The only thing that can agreed upon when it comes to production/non-production is that any non-production change should not affect production.   I would also be interested in hearing from someone who is already doing this.  –fred SDM12.7 CABI 3.2 (SP5)

[L.Elias]

The server family has an "environment" field OOTB I believe (dont think we added it) but its just a string field which we converted to a dropdown on the display form, but it doesn't serve much purpose in the grand scheme of things unless you're looking at that one particular server. As far as I'm aware you can't filter based on that field in the Visualizer so all environments show up when looking at relationships.

 

For example, we have Server CI "hosts" Application CI, so if you are looking at the App it will show ALL servers with no way to differentiate between Prod, Dev, etc.

 

I'm very interested in how other folks have been doing this as its something that came up again recently here.