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Configuration management database

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A configuration management database (CMDB) is a unified or federated repository of information related to all the components of an information system. It helps an organization to understand the relationships between these components and track their configuration. The CMDB is a fundamental component of the ITIL framework's Configuration Management process .

The CMDB records configuration items (CI) and details about the important attributes and relationships between CIs. Configuration managers usually describe CIs using three configurable attributes:

  1. Technical
  2. Ownership
  3. Relationship

A key success factor in implementing a CMDB is the ability to automatically discover information about the CIs (auto-discovery), and track changes as they happen.

CMDBs contain metadata, and thus the concept overlaps with that of a metadata repository—both are used in running large IT organizations. Configuration management addresses how the data is to be kept up to date, which has historically been a weakness of metadata repositories.

References

  • Office of Government Commerce (OGC), ed.: Service Support. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The Stationary Office, Norwich, UK (2000)
  • OGC, ed.: Introduction to ITIL. IT Infrastructure Library. The Stationary Office (2005)


See also

Components for software/hardware/network configuration management

  • ZENmetrics, an agentless software component for collecting and integrating CMDB data with 3rd party and bespoke applications.

CMDB vendors

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