CMDB Challenges and Best Practices

CMDB ep. 2 Challenges and Best Practices

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Hello and welcome to the Ultimate Guide to the Device 42 Configuration Management Database or CMDB podcast series. I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. In this episode, we are going to explore what a CMDB is, the elements of a CMDB, including CIs, and attribute relationships and why a clean, up-to-date CMDB is important for IT operations. Joining us today from Device 42 is Chris Begnini, Director of Solutions Architects and James McFadden, Senior Solutions Architect. Thank you both for being with me today.

(Guest: James McFadden)

It’s a pleasure.

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

You’re welcome and thanks for having us, Michelle.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Absolutely. Looking forward to the conversation. Before we dive in though, can I get a brief bio from both of you, maybe starting with Chris?

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Sure. Chris Begnini here, as Michelle mentioned, Director of the Solution Architect Team at Device 42. I’ve been with Device 42 for about a decade now. I’ve been in the IT space for over 20 years, system admin, and then moving into the sales side of things. What I do here is really specialize in enabling our prospects, as well as our customers and our partners that use Device 42 from a technical perspective. I’ll turn it over to James, who’s on my team.

(Guest: James McFadden)

Hi, everyone. James McFadden, Senior Solutions Architect with Device 42. As Chris mentioned, I am on his team. I’m one of the folks that works with him on a regular basis. I’ve been with Device 42 for about two years. I’ve been in the IT industry for about 15. The majority of my time and my skill set resides in the network space, network and network security. I’ve got a lot to feed in there and then a lot for CMDB here when it comes to leveraging Device 42 and platforms and feeding in CMDB data.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Yeah, we have a lot to get to, so let’s get into it. What do people struggle with today in keeping their CMDB up to date? And then what are some of the common challenges?

(Guest: James McFadden)

I think that the biggest challenge across the board is both sufficient and accurate data. So when we start talking about what’s in your CMDB, it’s going to be effectively useless unless you have both accurate, up-to-date and high-quality data, which has been normalized, deduplicated, and a number of things in that manner. If you have a bunch of information that’s effectively not useful, then that CMDB as a whole becomes not useful. You definitely want to have data that’s going to be high quality, so accurate data, up-to-date information. So it doesn’t help you if all your data is 10 years old and it is no longer valid, right? And then actually having it deduplicated, so not trying to pour through mountains of duplicate entries to find the right one to identify what you actually need to work with. Chris, what do you think?

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Yeah, no, I think you’re spot on, James. I think one of the big things I see a lot is just having disparate data sources. So no unified source of truth, multiple teams using multiple spreadsheets, and the big thing too is there’s no standardization. So you have data being tracked a certain way, and it could be covering the same data points, but missing maybe serial numbers in one place is missing the operating system in another if we’re talking about IT asset management. And a lot of that can result in poor data governance. And one of the things is as you’re having all these different data points or tracking data that’s spread across multiple sheets, there’s also multiple people using them, right? And that creates a variance in the data quality and the standardization, as I mentioned. It’s what we kind of call too many chefs in the kitchen. So you really want to limit the people that’s managing the data. So for example, not everyone should be allowed to create custom fields or objects that could affect the whole data, the overall data structure. James, anything you want to add to that?

(Guest: James McFadden)

Yeah, regarding multiple chefs in the kitchen, not only are you going to have different fields of data that don’t necessarily become cohesive throughout your entire CRDP, but you’re also going to have process differences, right? So different organizations, if you’re not following the same process, they’re ingesting data in different manners. Maybe they’re bringing in information in ways that are not congruent with the methodologies that are going to be appropriate for all systems to leverage that data, right? So it really becomes an issue when you don’t have a congruent process, as well as a uniform group of individuals who are all in lockstep in the same sheet of music to actually get all that information correctly and accurately.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

So talking about correct and accurate, and going back to that too many chefs in the kitchen, a lot of variables here, right? So how do you gauge the maturity of the state of your CMDB, maybe based on some of the examples we heard with some challenges, and how do you know if your CMDB is up to standards?

(Guest: James McFadden)

So speaking of standards, one of the most common methodologies in ensuring that a CMDB is up to date and accurate is leveraging ITIL processes. So are you actively engaged in continuous improvement of your CMDB? Do you have processes in actually a written place, a written location that all organizations need to follow in order to adjust this data? And then are your people actually following those processes, right? So you can set up all the frameworks in the world, but if your organizations aren’t actually following those rules and those guidelines in order to get accurate data in and to continuously improve this data set, then you’re going to have disparate functionality in a single platform, right? Which is definitely not the goal. Chris, what do you think about that?

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Yeah, no, one of the things too is around probably data governance. So how is data being normalized? Is there basically a process in place where you’re looking at consolidating things, whether it’s by host name or some kind of algorithm, is there somebody manually just doing something or is there an API that’s driving things and there’s automation that’s happening daily and not just weekly or monthly? So a big thing too is when we talk about aggregating data is really a source of truth and source of truth is, it’s a great thing, but it’s not as simple because if you have different data points coming from different places, how are you correlating that data? Are you aggregating it correctly and are you really strategizing on that source of truth or are you just kind of throwing everything in there and then having duplicates, but there’s no way of reinforcing that? And then I think another way of looking at it is, are you actually coming into situations where you’re lacking information? So if you think of maybe an incident or a change request and you go to do something on a daily basis, or maybe it’s an emergency, are you actually running into a problem where data is missing or that you can’t find the contact owner or you can’t find what number you need to call? And I think those are important things to look at, whether you’re measuring your CMDB correctly.

(Guest: James McFadden)

Speaking of measuring and metrics actually, so when organizations are struggling with accurate data and getting this data normalization, right, and deduplication, and actually having a single record all actually have the information that they need on a single page, for example. One of the things that a lot of organizations come to us for, and you know, shameless plug for device 42, is they say, Hey, we’re spending X amount of hours just trying to collect all of the information that we need in order to actually solve the problem that we have, right? And so if you are constantly trying to just find the information in order to fix the thing, you’re not fixing the thing. You’re losing tons of money. And that’s where process being in place and actually having accurate data from multiple sources accurately gated into a single source of truth is really, really important. So a lot of times it’ll be a scenario where it’s like, Hey, we got to figure out how much money we’re actually losing just due to the CMDB not actually being up to date.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Nothing wrong with the shameless plug. Just saying. So a lot of things come into play with CMDB, but what are common foundational requirements for successful CMDB?

(Guest: James McFadden)

Absolute organizational buy-in. So if you go out and buy a platform, you know, insert CMDB solution here, it doesn’t matter what it is, if your organizations are not actually sold on, Hey, this is the solution to our problem. They’re not going to use it. And then you’re just going to have an expensive piece of software that’s sitting there, not actually affecting your business and helping your bottom line.

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Yeah. James, I was just going to add to that one too, it’s just that I think that’s a really important one. I mean, you really have to have top down support and an organization, you know, if in a lot of times, I mean, what we see across the board, different verticals too, is, you know, CIO takes the job and finds out that there’s no CMDB and says, why? You know, and that’s a, that’s a big initiative to trickling that down and enforcing that, you know, there is a buy-in here and now we have to find the right solution.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

So, you know, we’re talking about, of course, the best strategies, and we’ve talked about some challenges because of course there are going to be challenges. The good part is there are solutions, right? That’s why we’re having this conversation. So what can really advance your CMDB? That maybe isn’t common, but it’s something that can elevate your CMDB.

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Yeah. You know, one thing I did want to mention, Michelle, just on the last point, is just a little bit around discovery and out of the box functionality that you have with common CMDB solutions that are out there. So, you know, when you think of a CMDB, you think of a repository of data and that data is only going to be as accurate as the process around how it’s being updated, how often it’s being updated. And, you know, one of the things that we see in organizations is that, you know, it’s good to have a monitoring solution, it’s good to be alerted when something goes down, but the bigger piece is, you know, having the ability to do discovery. And what I mean by discovery is a way to go out there, whether it’s agentless, whether it’s an agent that runs on a machine and it tells you something about that device and gives you an up-to-date status on that device. And what’s important about that is discovery, having discovery feeding into a CMDB, helps enrich that data, helps keep it accurate. And that’s going to be where, you know, again, kind of measuring the maturity and the success of your CMDB, it’s all going to be dependent on how accurate the data is and how often it is kept up to date. So, you know, in any organization within just a few hours, there’s changes. So having some type of discovery mechanism is a good way to make sure, ensure that it’s up to date.

(Guest: James McFadden)

Yeah. And I think just to tee off of that too, like having all the discovery and getting all the information and in a uniform manner is super critical, but how do we leverage that data? Like, do we integrate with other platforms or does your CMDB function with other tools so we can feed that data into other things and make you more effective as an organization, right? Reducing that human workload and replacing that with machine automation, right? So having the integrations in place to actually get that data where it needs to go, when it needs to be there and in the relevant locations for those processes and automations to take place is going to be super critical.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

So clearly there’s so much information we can cover here. That’s why we’re doing a series because we cannot cover it all in one episode. So we are almost out of time for this session. So what would you say are the key takeaways, Chris, James, from today’s session?

(Guest: James McFadden)

I think when it comes to CMDBs and making sure that you’re actually effective or your CMDBs effective, you need to find the gaps, analyze the gaps and then fill the gaps, right? So finding the gaps, identify the actual deficiencies within your CMDB, if you have one already in place, right? If you don’t have one, you probably have one. But if you’re taking too long to get data or you’re lacking the data that you actually need on a database on a daily basis, then I would start to analyze those. And then we get into actually analyzing the gaps.

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Yeah. And to touch on that, it’s really getting a full depth of the problem and the possible solutions, right? So what is the root cause analysis, for instance, was there a person that was supposed to fill something in or should it have been automated? So as you start analyzing the actual gaps within your data, then that’s going to be how you can start determining how you want to fill those gaps as James was alluding to. And then you take action on it, right? So you take action on remediating that, whether it’s tools like Device42 to help do discovery if it’s lack of automation and data being up to date, or it’s a tool that can be more of a source of truth to aggregate data and making sure that if you’re sending different data points, that there’s a way, maybe it’s a matching identifier or something that correlates the data and ensures that there’s no duplication. And I know James, you want to add on anything else with filling the gaps there?

(Guest: James McFadden)

Yeah. I think leveraging tools to help you out is a huge deal. But at the end of the day, it’s going to be humans that are building the tools to leverage this information from the CMDB. And it’s going to be the humans that are actually involved with building processes around the data that’s in that CMDB, right? So I think a lot of remediation is going to be a blend of tooling and process. So the tools are amazing, right? But you’ve got to have a good process around that too. So understanding the tool is going to be critical. And then being able to build process and policy around that tool set around your people and your organizations, that’s going to be super critical.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

Chris Benigni, Director of Solutions Architects and James McFadden, Senior Solutions Architect for Device42. Thank you both for being with me today. Of course, as I said, we are just really kind of scratching the surface here. So we’ll continue the series, but thank you for taking part once again in this continuing series.

(Guest: Chris Begnini)

Oh, you’re welcome, Michelle. And thank you for having us.

(Host: Michelle Dawn Mooney)

And I want to thank all of you for joining us today for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Device42 CMDB. Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode on CMDB challenges and best practices. I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. We hope to connect with you on another podcast soon.