Populate CIs in CMDB

The CMDB, when catered to the IT environment, functions as a decision making tool, impact and root cause analyzer. But, by populating a large amount of data, your CMDB may turn complex, causing a loss in structure and information, thereby making its analysis less effective.

So how can you build an efficient CMDB without turning it complex? ServiceDesk Plus gives you a step-by-step process to identify the essential CIs and populate them in your CMDB.

Steps to populate CIs in CMDB

To set up a less complicated CMDB design, strategize on your CI List and their supported attributes and relationships. Given below are 3 easy steps through which you can effectively populate CIs in your CMDB.

Step #1: Narrow down the CI List

The first step is to identify the business critical CIs as per your organizations environment. Next, group them in appropriate CI Types. Each CI Type holds its own attributes and relationships that are defined with key stakeholders from the Service Catalog Management, Change Management and the likes.

Some of the entities that can contribute to your CI list are,

• Business Service

• Hardware ( IT and Non IT assets, components)

• Software (which are installed in the server/workstation like applications, operating systems, database)

• Department

• Documents (license agreement, contract, lease agreement)

• Users and Support Groups

NOTE: Please note that not all software are considered as CIs. The software which are installed in the server/workstation, and group under a CI Type are alone considered as Configuration Items (CIs).

Step #2: Populate the Configuration Items

After the CI List is strategized and confirmed, you need to populate the Configuration Items (CIs). ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus gives you various ways through which you can effectively populate CIs into your CMDB.

Populate Workstation/Devices

• Windows Domain Scan

• Network Scan

Populate Users/Technicians

• Importing from Active Directory (for Windows machine)

• Importing from LDAP

Populate other CIs such as IT services, Business Services, Department

• Importing CIs from CSV file

• Manual Addition of CIs

NOTE: Make sure that the CI information in your CMDB is updated from time-to-time.

Step #3: Create the Information Model

The overall information model is complete only when the relationships between the CIs are defined. While populating Configuration Items using any of the methods in Step 2, the inter-dependencies between the CIs are identified and established. The relationships can be viewed from the Relationship Map which helps in impact and root cause analysis.