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CMDB/CMS Use Cases: Service Impact Management

Although CMDBs grew up with a focus more on process control than on performance management and real-time actions, design advances and new trends such as cloud computing are changing that dramatically. Operational professionals with concerns such as Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) and Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF) can benefit greatly from a “reconciled view of truth” including the impacts of change on performance, both of which are ultimately dependent on a CMDB/CMS foundation.

Some of the more dramatic use cases here include:

A Reconciled View of Truth Across Many Multiple Sources: One CMDB/CMS initiative reduced Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) 70%, when downtime costs were estimated at $1 million a minute, by providing a more cohesive way of leveraging its many monitoring tools, and consolidating down to a single service desk.

Reflexive Insights into Change and Configuration for Diagnostics: Automating insights between configuration and change issues and performance issues to support real-time or proactive diagnostics is a core value of a service impact CMDB/CMS.

Validation that a Newly Provisioned Service is Performing Effectively (or not): Once a service has been deployed, what for instance is the impact on end-user experience?

Incident and Problem Management Automation and Governance: When CMDB/CMS is combined with strong support ITIL or other workflows and process definitions, it can accelerate the time to resolve problems and harden desired processes so that they are more consistently followed.

Finding the Owner: Automating and securing the process of finding individuals who “own” a problem or CI, though seemingly trivial, can nevertheless bring significant benefits –- up to $100,000 a year in just opex-related phone time between the service desk and operations in the case of one EMA client.

Business Process and Service-Specific Benefits: Having a cohesive vision of “truth” can positively impact business processes as far ranging as loan processing, to hospital management and admissions, to manufacturing line efficiencies, as just a few examples.


Figure 1: Service Impact Management prioritizes more real-time, operational insights and is in many respects a complementary technology to more process-centric, traditional CMDBs. However, both are anchored core insights into application-to-infrastructure and infrastructure-to-infrastructure interdependencies.

From a Service Impact perspective, EMA identified the following four Value Leaders:

AccelOps

AccelOps was third from the highest score in overall rankings and first in Deployment and Cost Efficiency as well as Functionality. AccelOps is often purchased as a service management system with strong capabilities in discovery, security, application dependency and CMDB modeling. Its deployments are consistently efficient and quickly lead to value, and so AccelOps is well optimized to the requirements of virtualized, cloud and hybrid environments.

ASG

ASG came in first in its overall vendor score. ASG has unique capabilities for assimilating third-party information, including that from performance management solutions to complement or supplement its own. It also has a healthy ability to federate and adapt to real-time insights. Combine this with strong application discovery and dependency mapping, solid dashboards, and a suite of its own monitoring tools –- and its position in the sun here is clear. As you may remember, ASG was also a value leader in Asset Management and Financial Optimization.

FireScope

FireScope was at the top for Deployment and Cost Efficiency for Service Impact Management, within the top three for Architecture and Integration and within the top third for Functionality. In addition to FireScope’s strong capabilities for Service Impact Management via its own product -- Unify, Orchestrate also profited from attractive dashboards -- including mashups, and a flexible way of assimilating third-party solutions that includes putting a “freshness stamp” on incoming data. FireScope won an award for “Most easily administered CMDB.”

Interlink

Interlink excelled in all functional and deployment areas. Interlink’s Service Configuration Manager is optimized to work with its Business Enterprise Server (BES) where it provides a complete system for Service Impact Management. It leverages insights into the impact of change, and has a far-reaching capability to assimilate interdependencies across the full service infrastructure from third-party sources. Interlink is a small vendor based in Edinburgh, Scotland, but it does have customers in the U.S. Its customers give it very high praise for its support.

Click here to read the CMDB/CMS use cases for Change Management and Change Impact Analysis

Click here to read the CMDB/CMS use cases for Asset Management and Financial Optimization

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CMDB/CMS Use Cases: Service Impact Management

Although CMDBs grew up with a focus more on process control than on performance management and real-time actions, design advances and new trends such as cloud computing are changing that dramatically. Operational professionals with concerns such as Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) and Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF) can benefit greatly from a “reconciled view of truth” including the impacts of change on performance, both of which are ultimately dependent on a CMDB/CMS foundation.

Some of the more dramatic use cases here include:

A Reconciled View of Truth Across Many Multiple Sources: One CMDB/CMS initiative reduced Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) 70%, when downtime costs were estimated at $1 million a minute, by providing a more cohesive way of leveraging its many monitoring tools, and consolidating down to a single service desk.

Reflexive Insights into Change and Configuration for Diagnostics: Automating insights between configuration and change issues and performance issues to support real-time or proactive diagnostics is a core value of a service impact CMDB/CMS.

Validation that a Newly Provisioned Service is Performing Effectively (or not): Once a service has been deployed, what for instance is the impact on end-user experience?

Incident and Problem Management Automation and Governance: When CMDB/CMS is combined with strong support ITIL or other workflows and process definitions, it can accelerate the time to resolve problems and harden desired processes so that they are more consistently followed.

Finding the Owner: Automating and securing the process of finding individuals who “own” a problem or CI, though seemingly trivial, can nevertheless bring significant benefits –- up to $100,000 a year in just opex-related phone time between the service desk and operations in the case of one EMA client.

Business Process and Service-Specific Benefits: Having a cohesive vision of “truth” can positively impact business processes as far ranging as loan processing, to hospital management and admissions, to manufacturing line efficiencies, as just a few examples.


Figure 1: Service Impact Management prioritizes more real-time, operational insights and is in many respects a complementary technology to more process-centric, traditional CMDBs. However, both are anchored core insights into application-to-infrastructure and infrastructure-to-infrastructure interdependencies.

From a Service Impact perspective, EMA identified the following four Value Leaders:

AccelOps

AccelOps was third from the highest score in overall rankings and first in Deployment and Cost Efficiency as well as Functionality. AccelOps is often purchased as a service management system with strong capabilities in discovery, security, application dependency and CMDB modeling. Its deployments are consistently efficient and quickly lead to value, and so AccelOps is well optimized to the requirements of virtualized, cloud and hybrid environments.

ASG

ASG came in first in its overall vendor score. ASG has unique capabilities for assimilating third-party information, including that from performance management solutions to complement or supplement its own. It also has a healthy ability to federate and adapt to real-time insights. Combine this with strong application discovery and dependency mapping, solid dashboards, and a suite of its own monitoring tools –- and its position in the sun here is clear. As you may remember, ASG was also a value leader in Asset Management and Financial Optimization.

FireScope

FireScope was at the top for Deployment and Cost Efficiency for Service Impact Management, within the top three for Architecture and Integration and within the top third for Functionality. In addition to FireScope’s strong capabilities for Service Impact Management via its own product -- Unify, Orchestrate also profited from attractive dashboards -- including mashups, and a flexible way of assimilating third-party solutions that includes putting a “freshness stamp” on incoming data. FireScope won an award for “Most easily administered CMDB.”

Interlink

Interlink excelled in all functional and deployment areas. Interlink’s Service Configuration Manager is optimized to work with its Business Enterprise Server (BES) where it provides a complete system for Service Impact Management. It leverages insights into the impact of change, and has a far-reaching capability to assimilate interdependencies across the full service infrastructure from third-party sources. Interlink is a small vendor based in Edinburgh, Scotland, but it does have customers in the U.S. Its customers give it very high praise for its support.

Click here to read the CMDB/CMS use cases for Change Management and Change Impact Analysis

Click here to read the CMDB/CMS use cases for Asset Management and Financial Optimization

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...