As we are not really consultants for modeling IT infrastructure, we are always looking for a good way to minimize our manual effort when installing our automation engine, I actually thought it should be easy to load the necessary M-A-R-S information out of any CMDB, but so far that has proven much more difficult than expected. Most CMDBs we have looked at, did either not supply the needed relationship and interdependency data or did not contain the static node information we need to bind rules. BUT yesterday we had a workshop at the IBM briefing center in Mainz to take a look at the IBM CCMDB. And tell you what: It looks like we found a CMDB that actually contains all the data we need to load the IT interdependency model. Even if some organizations keep attributes we need for rule binding in excel sheets or other strange data sources we can load them off the IBM CCMDB through its federation technology.
But that is not the whole story. We were quite exuberant about the depth of relationship and interdependencies stored in the CMDB, but it really got amazing when we saw in an actual environment, that most of the interdependencies were detected automatically. Someone at IBM actually did the work of modeling quite some ssh connections and scripts to pull this information out of netstat and other system calls. Well going though firewalls without losing the network angle seems to be a difficulty that means actual real time detection of different zones of trust is not really possible, but what we are getting out here is much better than anything we have seen before. It will save us about 80% time on implementing automation for highly complex applications. Also the time our customers need to maintain the model in place while they change their IT landscape is probably greatly reduced. We will look into creating a persistent interface to the IBM CCMDB and while we are at it to their event bus and execution facilities as well.
You know my comments on other CMDBs and our difficulties of reading anything more than SML out of them. Normally I am quite taken aback and don´t say much, but this time I am really happy.
