The Power of the CMDB, Know You Must
Learn from the experts as Industry Leader Yama Habibzai, and our guest speaker from Covenant Health, Enterprise Infrastructure Architect Adam Sherwood show the power of the CMDB and how the next generation of the CMDB will fulfill its promise.
Questions asked during the presenation
1. Is Device42 really a CMDB?
It depends how you look at it. CMDBs traditionally build repositories of CIs building relationships with business benefits. While Device42 does this, it also has many other capabilities. The automated discovery across a variety of technologies, automatically normalizes the data, and then provides insights and dashboards based on the data. We think of Device42 as sort of next generation CMDB.
Device42 is not marketed as CMDB because it is more than that. We provide automation with actionable insights that traditional CMDBs cannot do without lots of manual effort.
2. Is Insights+ a different module or does it come with the base product? How can a customer add Insights+ to the platform?
Insights+ comes native to the platform and embedded within Device42. If you’re an existing customer you need to upgrade to version 18 to gain access to use Insights+. If you are a new customer, Insights+ will automatically be included in the platform when you install Device42.
3. (For Adam – Device42 customer) Do you have public cloud workloads and how are you handling cloud resources with your CMDB?
Adam: “We do have IaaS and PaaS workloads in Azure. We discovered those workloads with Device42 and it turned out to be very valuable to have the cloud resources next to the on-premises resources in a single pane of glass. The setup of that discovery was very easy to complete with Device42.”
4. What does Device42 have that a traditional CMDB wouldn’t have?
A traditional CMDB is a platform where you must establish data ingestion from various connections and data sources. It can become cumbersome and difficult to manage. Device42 provides you with a fully automated data collection method by discovering everything in your environment and providing data cleanliness with normalization and categorization. Device42 enhances your business decisions with data-backed insights, then provides full visibility with integrations to 3rd party platforms like ITSMs to track down the root source of a problem if for instance an outage occurs.
5. (For Adam – Device42 customer) How did you manage the expectations of the CMDB stakeholders regarding discovery and automation? Discovery and automation reduce the workload but how much of it is manual effort to maintain.
Adam: “Discovering networks, and computers on the network is straightforward. [Without Device42] application inventory can be challenging to discover. You’ll get a lot of information and there’s a normalization and reconciliation. How did we manage the expectations? You must communicate with your stakeholders early and often, setting expectations for the work that will be required and the value it will generate.”
6. How is this different from ServiceNow discovery?
ServiceNow is one of our partners that we collaborate with often. It comes down to time to value, in terms of how quickly you can receive value from the platform. Our customers have benefited from the relationship by enhancing their ServiceNow database with Device42 discovered data. Device42 can collect and normalize data to feed into ServiceNow really well. The value Device42 brings is accurate data, automated processes reducing maintenance requirements, insights and visibility into your environment, and much quicker time to value.
7. (For Adam – Device42 customer) What IT Service Management Tool are you using and how difficult was it to build out your CMDB using Device42 as your single source of truth.
Adam: “Sure, for ITSM we do change and incident management. Our change management is done using an in-house developed web application. We are re-implementing our change management with Device42’s Rest API. Incident management is tougher. We use a different tool with an API and receive device records from Device42, change records, and incident records from 3 separate systems. Device42’s Rest API is the underpinnings to keep all the data sources running in harmony.”
8. May I know how CMDB can be adapted into a company that has IoT domain as primary focus?
When it comes to automation, having the right platform or tool to collect that information from IoT devices is imperative. This tool needs to be able to collect and capture data to feed into your CMDB. The IT industry as a whole struggles with IoT devices since they’re very specific and difficult to capture. Device42 can discover some IoT devices and information, but to get the full details Device42 would need to integrate with another platform.
9. Does Device42 handle IT parts (non-CIs)? If yes, is there functionality to manage min/max levels of such inventory?
Yes, in addition to software, Device42 can manage inventories of physical and virtual resources. Device42 discovers and updates hardware devices on your network or OS including physical, virtual, blade, clusters, switches or any other device types. Once device types are discovered, you can modify devices and see the locations, part numbers, and inventory counts for a specific model or part number as well.
10. Can you please show a use case for Oracle 19c?
Device42 discovery supports a number of Oracle database versions including Oracle 19c. You can see an example of an Oracle 19c discovery job setup here: https://docs.device42.com/auto-discovery/database-discovery/#section-8
11. For the Discovery, is Windows Server 2022 already available, if not, what’s the timeline look like?
Yes, Device42 can discover all Windows Server 2000 and up, including Windows Server 2022. If you require any assistance setting up discovery, just reach out to us and we would be happy to help!
12. What are the limitations of using CMDB?
A CMDB is a repository of all your IT configuration items and their relationships. The challenges and limitations of a CMDB if not maintained properly include but are not limited to: the resources and processes to acquire data, data accuracy and updates, age of data, data dependencies, ownership roles, etc. Device42 can act as a next-generation CMDB, utilizing automation to provide you continuously accurate data with actionable insights that traditional CMDBs cannot do without lots of manual effort.
13. Does Device42 allow for the importing of assets from other tools?
Yes! You can easily import and/or export data. Additionally, we have tight integrations with over 30 existing IT tools you may be already using, like JIRA, ServiceNow, Freshworks, etc.
14. Does Device42 discover all the AWS entities besides the EC2 instances like any workloads and other AWS items?
AWS has many technologies and continues to deliver new services. We may never be able to catch up with all their services available, but if you have a specific service in mind, you may schedule time with us to discuss.