A Better Practices Guide for Populating a CMDB: Examples of IT Configuration Management for the Computer Room, the Datacentre and the Cloud

This guide is an in-depth look at what you should and should not include as configuration items in an IT Services model. Unlike many other books on this topic, this goes into deep technical detail and provides many examples. The first section covers some useful approaches for starting to populate a CMDB with high-level services.

• What is the least amount of work you can do and still have a valid CMDB?
• What are some techniques that you can use to identify what business and technical services you should include?
• Can anything be automated to work more efficiently?

The second section covers three common in-house architectures:

• LAMP stack applications
• Modern enterprise web applications
• Relational databases, with some brief notes about other forms of database

The final section details how to model applications delivered through the cloud, and what CI attributes can be useful to record. This section covers the three main types of cloud-delivered application:

• Software as a service applications, using Google Apps as an example.
• Platform as a service applications, using Google App Engine as an example
• Infrastructure as a service applications, using the Amazon and HP infrastructure.

While this book was written to support customers using HP Service Manager, the content which is specific to HPSM is quite small and easily applicable to other ITIL / ITSM CMDB / CMS tools.