vFire Core CMDB

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The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) forms the cornerstone of all IT service management implementations.

The quality of data within the CMDB affects the efficiency of IT service management and corporate service management. vFire Core provides a wide range of features to help you manage your CMDB, from creating CMDB records to linking CMDB entities, freezing configuration items and services and searching for CMDB records.

vFire Core's CMDB includes service level agreements, service catalogs, warranties and knowledge. It offers a comprehensive system for applying ITIL service asset and configuration management (SACM) processes, as it integrates with Incident or Problem management (IPK), Workflow Management and Service Level Management (SLM) and enables the enterprise to manage evolving relationships of items with people, internal departments and locations, other organizations and external suppliers.

It can also integrate with several third-party hardware and software discovery tools such as  Service Assurance Manager to detect external resources on these applications. The resources can then be imported into vFire Core as new CMDB items or be linked to existing CMDB records.

The CMDB Architecture

vFire Core's CMDB contains the following entities:

Configuration Items (CIs) The range of entities that an organization may wish to log an incident or request against (such as a server or application)

Configuration Items, Services, Service Actions and Service Bundles are sometimes grouped together and referred to as “CMDB Items” in vFire Core.

(vCloud) Items

The system includes several CMDB item types that are specific to Cloud Provisioning. They are meant to be used in conjunction with the vFire connector for VMware vCloud Director and constitute the base of the CMDB for management of virtual items. Each of these types is closely related to an entity type that exists in vCloud Director. One recommended usage is to create CMDB Items template based on these (vCloud) types and to use these templates when setting up Federated CMDB integration with vCloud Director.
Services, Service Actions and Service Bundles The portfolio of services offered by your organization.

Configuration Items, Services, Service Actions and Service Bundles are sometimes grouped together and referred to as “CMDB Items” in vFire Core.
People Analysts, Users and external contacts (analysts in charge of managing relationships with external suppliers)
Organizations Companies (including external suppliers) and departments to which your analysts, Users and external contacts belong
Locations Physical addresses of people and organizations
Cost Centers Units or departments within organizations against which costs are collected and to which people can be linked.
Jurisdictions Cost centers and organizations which analysts can select when performing asset transactions
Subscriber Groups Groups of subscribers (people or organizations) that are allowed to order service entities from the vFire Self Service portal
Contracts Warranty, support or maintenance contracts your organization has with external suppliers
Agreements Agreements you have in place with your Users (SLAs – Service Level Agreements), internal departments (OLAs – Operational Level Agreements) and external suppliers (UCs – Underpinning Contracts) in order to enhance your service delivery.

Analysts can create individual CMDB records for each of the entity types described above, and link them as appropriate. For example, you can use the Person entity type to create records for your Users and the Organization entity type to create records for the organizations or departments to which your Users belong, and then link these records together to reflect the relationships between Users and organizations.

The system administrator can also define Configuration Item, Service, Service Action and Service Bundle sub types. For example, the administrator may define CI sub types such as Hardware and Software, or Service sub types such as Email, Internet and Virus Protection. Under Hardware, the administrator may also create Hardware sub types such as Server, Printer and Router, and so on. Analysts can then create individual records using these sub types. For example, you can use the Printer sub type to create records for each of the printers used in your organization.

Sub types inherit the properties of the parent type and can be associated with a specific screen set configured through the Designer to capture only the details relevant to that CMDB item type. This ability to create a multi-tiered structure enables organizations with a large number of configuration items and services to classify their assets and use specially configured details screens for each CI and service type. This grants organizations the ability to tailor the CMDB to meet their exact requirements.

To find out more about setting up your CMDB, see Configuring your CMDB.

To learn how to add and manage CMDB entities, select the following topics: