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How to Improve Your APM Deployment with CMDB

Ramy Hassanein

In a perfect world, deployments would always go as planned – however in the world of IT we all know that is not the case. There's a long list of reasons why Application Performance Management (APM) deployments might fail. Some reasons can be aligned to people, others to process and finally some to product.

Today's applications are no longer simple or static in nature. Applications now cover everything from mobile to mainframe and can reside within your datacenter to the cloud as well as everything in between. With that, many questions start to arise:

How do we know what to manage?

How do we determine what the application is made of?

Do we need to deploy an agent?

If so, what kind of agent is needed?

These are all great questions and probably only a handful of examples, but the first task that needs to be addressed is prioritizing applications along with their impact on the business. Higher priority applications are the ones you need to invoke management on first and where detailed transactions coupled with customer experience matter the most. Once you have your "Hit List" the next step is to look under the hood and determine what makes up these applications.

Enter the Configuration Management Database

That is where the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) comes into play. Organizations have spent a tremendous amount of time and resources properly building out and furthermore keeping their CMDB, CIs & relationships accurate. Multiple sources that are designated as Metadata Repositories (MDRs) provide a lot of information to the CMDB so that it becomes the single source of truth within an organizations. So why not leverage all that hard work and precise data?

Within the CMDB and simply by taking a look at the visualizer service map of a particular service you can determine:

1. Who consumes the service>

2. What OS & Servers host the service?

3. What platform is used (eg. Java, .NET…)?

4. What datacenter?

5. Does Production deployment of this app looks like UAT or Test or QA?

And the list goes on.

Leveraging CMDB Can Help You Get Out of Reactive Mode

Historically APM and ITIL have always been a perfect match. It's not just about getting out of reactive mode anymore, but the union is so much more than just password resets or outages and application support. With the focus on continual process improvement, APM can leverage ITIL to help monitor Service Level Agreements (SLAs) metrics which works hand in hand with Service Support and Service Lifecycle. Typically, when we think of this harmonious integration we forget to include the CMDB, and just think about traditional ticket life cycles and MTTR.

When new changes happen in an organization, the first place that should know about it is the Service Desk and the CMDB updated accordingly.

Therefore, a great tool to leverage during any phase of an APM deployment would be your CMBD and its service maps. It can help determine where and what is needed to make sure you are managing your applications correctly with all its components. Whether in the beginning phases of an initial deployment of APM or expanding deployments of agents within an organization, you can use the CMDB's service views to assist. This can even help break down silos that might exist in larger organizations and get APM out of isolation.

Ramy Hassanein is Sr. Principal Consultant at CA Technologies.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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How to Improve Your APM Deployment with CMDB

Ramy Hassanein

In a perfect world, deployments would always go as planned – however in the world of IT we all know that is not the case. There's a long list of reasons why Application Performance Management (APM) deployments might fail. Some reasons can be aligned to people, others to process and finally some to product.

Today's applications are no longer simple or static in nature. Applications now cover everything from mobile to mainframe and can reside within your datacenter to the cloud as well as everything in between. With that, many questions start to arise:

How do we know what to manage?

How do we determine what the application is made of?

Do we need to deploy an agent?

If so, what kind of agent is needed?

These are all great questions and probably only a handful of examples, but the first task that needs to be addressed is prioritizing applications along with their impact on the business. Higher priority applications are the ones you need to invoke management on first and where detailed transactions coupled with customer experience matter the most. Once you have your "Hit List" the next step is to look under the hood and determine what makes up these applications.

Enter the Configuration Management Database

That is where the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) comes into play. Organizations have spent a tremendous amount of time and resources properly building out and furthermore keeping their CMDB, CIs & relationships accurate. Multiple sources that are designated as Metadata Repositories (MDRs) provide a lot of information to the CMDB so that it becomes the single source of truth within an organizations. So why not leverage all that hard work and precise data?

Within the CMDB and simply by taking a look at the visualizer service map of a particular service you can determine:

1. Who consumes the service>

2. What OS & Servers host the service?

3. What platform is used (eg. Java, .NET…)?

4. What datacenter?

5. Does Production deployment of this app looks like UAT or Test or QA?

And the list goes on.

Leveraging CMDB Can Help You Get Out of Reactive Mode

Historically APM and ITIL have always been a perfect match. It's not just about getting out of reactive mode anymore, but the union is so much more than just password resets or outages and application support. With the focus on continual process improvement, APM can leverage ITIL to help monitor Service Level Agreements (SLAs) metrics which works hand in hand with Service Support and Service Lifecycle. Typically, when we think of this harmonious integration we forget to include the CMDB, and just think about traditional ticket life cycles and MTTR.

When new changes happen in an organization, the first place that should know about it is the Service Desk and the CMDB updated accordingly.

Therefore, a great tool to leverage during any phase of an APM deployment would be your CMBD and its service maps. It can help determine where and what is needed to make sure you are managing your applications correctly with all its components. Whether in the beginning phases of an initial deployment of APM or expanding deployments of agents within an organization, you can use the CMDB's service views to assist. This can even help break down silos that might exist in larger organizations and get APM out of isolation.

Ramy Hassanein is Sr. Principal Consultant at CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...