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Empower Your IT Service Management Systems with Accurate Configuration Data
Tideway Foundation sits at the heart of your infrastructure and service management ecosystems. It delivers a single source of accurate, constantly refreshed configuration item and dependency information that feeds virtually any service management tool.
The Cornerstone of ITIL
More and more companies are embracing the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) as the cornerstone of their ITIL implementation. But implementing a CMDB is a hugely challenging project – and research shows the majority fail due to data quality issues. Relying on manual processes to keep the CMDB up-to-date is expensive ($75,000 per refresh in a 1000 server environment) and inaccurate because the data rapidly decays. This leads to a lack of trust in the data, a lack of adoption, and finally a slow death for your CMDB project.
What are your options? You can slow change down to a crawl so your CMDB can keep up, or you can automate.
Tideway Foundation auto-populates and maintains CMDBs with Configuration Items (CIs) such as networks, servers, software products and business applications, including the dependencies between them. You’ll save between 60 and 120 person days for every CMDB update in a 1000 server environment. Foundation provides unimpeachable data quality to ensure your CMDB has the broadest and deepest coverage.. As a result you can build trust with your CMDB user community, drive uptake and promote usage – and make everyone wonder how they ever got by without it.
Benefits:
- Accelerate rollout by automatically populating CIs and dependencies
- Reduce manual maintenance of CI and dependency information
- Increase confidence in CMDB quality
- Improve success rate in dependent ITIL processes such as Change and Problem management
| Task | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Configuration Item (CI) and Dependency refresh (per complete scan) |
250-500 hrs | 24 mins | 99% |
| Manual effort to update CMDB daily | 62 FTEs | 1 FTE | 98% |
| Data quality | 70% | 97%+ | 38% |
In a 1000 server environment
Accurate Service Maps
Business Service Management (BSM) products rely on accurate and up-to-date service views so IT can manage from the perspective of the business service rather than the IT silo. But it’s often impossible to roll-out BSM over more than a handful of business applications – which limits the value and impacts ROI. Why? Maintaining the service maps is a costly and error-prone manual process. And you can’t correlate the prime cause of application problems – infrastructure change – to those service maps.
Tideway Foundation helps by automatically creating and maintaining those service views with the highest data quality available and generating change events that can be correlated against those service views.
Benefits
| Task | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service map refresh time (50 server app) | 25 hrs | 0.02 hrs | 99% |
| Failed fixes | 20% | 10% | 50% |
| Data quality | 70% | 97%+ | 38% |
| MTTR | 40 mins | 28 mins | 30% |
Change Visibility
Change is a reality in today’s fast-paced business environment, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the IT infrastructure. The average data center has around 6.6 changes per server per month - and each of those changes has the potential to cause application downtime. Yet understanding the impact of any change is based on guesswork. No wonder 80% of application downtime is caused by errant change.
Tideway Foundation shows the exact configuration of any CI at any point in time, including its dependencies to other CIs and business applications. Foundation enables change managers to accurately predict the impact of any change - and build efficient change approval groups from accurate ownership information. And Foundation makes all infrastructure changes visible so you can easily spot and roll-back unapproved changes and quickly verify approved changes.
From Reactive to Proactive
Today’s service desk is largely reactive and has to wait for problems to surface before fixing them. This is because there is no way to automatically confirm that IT configuration policies are being applied across the infrastructure – so non-standard configurations abound.
Tideway Foundation provides a simple way to define configuration policies and get daily access to exception reports. These exceptions can be used to automatically raise trouble tickets in the service desk before users experience problems.
Benefits
| Task | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Configuration Item (CI) and Dependency refresh (per complete scan) |
250-500 hrs | 24 mins | 99% |
| Data quality | 70% | 97%+ | 38% |
Accurate Assets
Keeping asset databases up-to-date is difficult in a fast paced IT environment. The servers listed in the fixed asset register often don’t match the reality, meaning nominally decommissioned assets remain in production. The reason is that manually auditing servers in the data center is inaccurate – and expensive.
Tideway Foundation provides a constantly updated server inventory view that can be reconciled with the fixed asset register – showing where discrepancies exist. We’ve consistently found that 2.5-5% of server assets running in the data center are marked as decommissioned in the asset register – immediate opportunities to consolidate.
Benefits
| Task | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Configuration Item (CI) and Dependency refresh (per complete scan) |
250-500 hrs | 24 mins | 99% |
| Data quality | 70% | 97%+ | 38% |
| Decommissioned assets still in production | 2.5-5% | 0% | $1M of server ownership costs removed |
In a 1000 server environment
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