ITIL; Proactive IT service management – we’d all like to get there. Around the world organizations are embracing the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) as the cornerstone of their ITIL implementation. However, implementing a CMDB is a hugely challenging project – and the majority fail due to data quality issues. Due to the scope of a CMDB – populating and maintaining hundreds of thousands of configuration items and dependencies to an appropriate level of granularity and quality is nearly impossible. The result is lack of trust in the data, leading to lack of uptake, leading to a slow death.

What are the options? Slow change down to a crawl so the CMDB can keep up, or automate.

Tideway Foundation™ can auto-populate and maintain CMDBs with Configuration Items (CIs) such as networks, servers, software products and business applications, as well as the dependencies that exist between them. Automating this process ensures that the required breadth and depth of your CMDB is possible to achieve with high data quality. This builds trust with your CMDB user community, and drives uptake and usage – and will make them wonder how they ever got by before.

Some of the benefits of automating CMDB population and maintenance include:

• Accelerated rollout through the automatic population of CIs and dependencies
• Reduced manual maintenance of CI and dependency information
• Increased confidence in the quality of the CMDB
• Improved success rate in dependent ITIL processes such as Change and Problem management