The IT Skeptic - Comments for "On-Demand CMDB reprise"

Wasted money

supportthought — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:55:50 +0000

7 figures goes a long way these days, it may almost be cheaper to duplicate devices. data and networks to remove all those dependencies we have such a hard time tracking down and managing.

CMDB is so 2007

skeptic — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:21:25 +0000

Pin pulled indeed :) Spot on.

In the most complex and critical of sites I can believe that a practiced professional configuration team with good analytical tools might be sufficiently more effective with a CMDB so as to justify the expense of that CMDB... but I gotta think it is pretty rare. Does what they miss cost justify the seven-figure bill to design, install, populate, maintain and audit a CMDB? And there is nothing even more important that the money should be used on? Not often. That's why there are so few CMDBs. "#bigfoot" as they say on Twitter.

Now we are in an even worse situation. Just maybe now and then a CMDB is the right thing to do. But the "experts" have moved on. CMDB is so 2007. Now it's CMS, which doesn't even exist. I'll blog on that one day. No rush - it won't exist for years.

Computers aren't very smart

riCh chestMat — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:01:28 +0000

Computers aren't very smart but they are good at dealing with lots of data. So for larger, more complex environments an experienced geek will miss so much. Identifying all the combinations of what could go wrong when one small change is made is like playing chess. So our geeks need the help of some software and it's one of the reasons why we want CMS as sold to us by ITIL and others.
So we want it - but does anyone provide it yet? I don't think so. That's partly why CMDB brings up such strong feelings.

In addition to the technical impacts of a change we now want to be able to understand the business impact. A link to the Service Catalogue can help with that - if you got a decent one. Strong feelings also in evidence there. The other approach which can help and has other benefits is to change our profession at geek level to a more business aligned one. Even more strong feelings about that I imagine.
Consider the pin pulled on that little shrapnel grenade.

professional configuration data analyst

skeptic — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:27:08 +0000

The data is staying with the geeks. What could be more geeky than a professional configuration data analyst working in the belly of IT Operations?

how many CMDBs provide that kind of "meta analysis" or "gotcha detection"? An experienced human is far more likely to produce that kind of alert

Unknown unknowns

JamesFinister — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:40:08 +0000

What still worries me is that what catches us out are the dependencies we didn't foresee. The point of a CMDB should be to do a meta analysis that isn't obvious. How do I know in advance that moving a scanner with a static IP address will stuff the entire network? OK, that one is inexcusable, but has happened to me.

Strangely I agree with keeping the data with the geeks, the question is how do we wake the geeks up to notice our change might impact them? We don't want to always go down to the lowest unit of information if we don't need to

My latest summation of On-Demand CMDB

skeptic — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 05:14:00 +0000

My latest summation of On-Demand CMDB, or wetware CMDB:

a couple of people who are designated owner/accountable for configuration data and process. Design, implement, rehearse and optimise a formal process for determining impact. Give them the mandate to prise the data from the geeks who currently hoard it. Give them tools for discovery and sampling and data analysis and reporting and whatever else they determine they need after trying the process, maybe even a CMDB.

How do you validate auto-discovery?

skeptic — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:06:18 +0000

One of these days I'll blog on "How do you validate auto-discovery?"

The ITIL books and I say that auto-discovery is only suitable of initial population and for ongoing audit of CMDB data (Service Transition 4.3.4.3 top of second column page 69). Those who advocate automated maintenance of data don't understand the distinction between asset database and CMDB, and don't understand the requirements of Configuration Management and its integration with Change process.

But even if you use it for audit, it is not a gold-standard benchmark to test against.

then we get on to the issue of what percentage of CIs are really under Change control.

And how reliable reconciliaton is.

And...

Yes

JoePearson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:01:37 +0000

I mean, yes subject to quite a lot more definition and sanitised-packaging-for-management.

Definition because your "idea" needs more flesh to determine if we're talking something viable or if there are gaping holes in the assumptions. (Just as the SKMS "idea" needs more flesh.)

By packaging for management, I'm thinking "don't worry, we have a full suite of federated CMDBs, but we haven't wasted money on predefined reports - we'll cook up and tweak the reports on demand". Whereas the more honest situation might be "we'll auto-discover and manually discover and slice-and-dice and correlate and de-duplicate and (whisper) extrapolate the missing necessary data on demand".

Picking up Antonio's notes on non-exact numbers, and in response to Jim on the original thread, who really believes that the CMDB/CMS is 100% accurate? And repeatable, scalable and reliable? Not me. You may not admit it to management, but on demand reporting could be just as accurate, or more, than pregenerated stuff.

I'm pretty sure it can work

avallesalas — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:46:15 +0000

I must admit that when I read your book, this was one of those "Knowledge Pearls" to read between the lines. I suddenly realized that this is using statistic sampling and that this is the correct way to infere knowledge from fuzy data.

Then I commented this with a colleague, a business intelligence expert, who laughed at me and said that it was a good joke, but internally I suspected that it can be possible.

Now, reading your... let's say more serious approach to the idea, I'm pretty sure.

¿Who wants to be the first to test?

The only problem is that we, geek people, don't like "non exact numbers", so those approaches that leaves you with a 99.5% confidence mean a 0,5 unconfidence... so we don't like statistics.. we like "real numbers".

But , as all the politics already know, real numbers are not cost-effective, and statistics are really cost-effective.

Antonio

BTW:: I see this approach more usable under the "incident re-classification" use-case than under the "CMDB populating" use-case.

Antonio Valle
G2, Gobierno y Gestión de TI
http://www.gobiernotic.es