Advancing Your CMDB
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Notes
Welcome to the ultimate guide to the Device42 Configuration Management Database. Cmdb podcast series I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. In previous episodes, we explored what a cmdb is, the elements and best practices to a healthy cmdb, as well as common challenges with immature or simplistic cmdbs. And today, we’re going to focus on the benefits of advancing a cmdb, as well as introducing a best of breed discovery tool and Cmdb solution.
Transcript
Michelle Dawn Mooney
Welcome to the ultimate guide to the Device42 Configuration Management Database. Cmdb podcast series I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. In previous episodes, we explored what a cmdb is, the elements and best practices to a healthy cmdb, as well as common challenges with immature or simplistic cmdbs. And today, we’re going to focus on the benefits of advancing a cmdb, as well as introducing a best of breed discovery tool and Cmdb solution. Device42. Joining us today from Device42 is Chris Bonini, director of Solutions architects, and James McFadden, Senior Solutions architect. Welcome and nice to see you again. Thank you for being here.
Chris Benigni
It’s a pleasure for having us.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
So let’s start here because we have a lot to get to. We’re going to try to get as much as much information to you as possible in a short amount of time. But what is an advanced cmdb as opposed to something that is green or maybe too simplistic?
Chris Benigni
Yeah, that’s a good point, Michel, and I can start with that. So I think, um, you know, when I think about advanced cmdb, I think of, you know, it’s really that time to value what do you get out of the box from that product or that solution? So a good example is, you know, do you have to build out configuration items and do you have to have, you know, or is there something that’s predefined. So usually with advanced seem to be you really want something that has a lot of functionality that’s already there. So you can go ahead and have SSIS. Um, but also being able to have relationships between the CI. So if you have, let’s say a customer or a department and there’s an end user that’s associated to it or a contact, all that information, it’s good to have those type of relationships and that that’s what helps make that documentation piece part of your advanced cmdb. Um, and then I’ll probably add over maybe to James. If you want to talk a little bit about flexibility too.
James McFadden
Yeah, actually. Um, so good points. I think flexibility and customization is going to be really important for all of Sis as well. So say you’ve got something that’s too simple. Well, you’re not going to have all the right categories of things that you want to have in your CNB. And therefore you’re kind of putting a square peg in a round hole and things don’t really line up or really make sense and make for some additional tribal knowledge required in order to even interact with that. Cmdb. And the whole point of that cmdb is to get away from tribal knowledge and have all the knowledge in a central location that people can reference, right? Um, now, in addition to that, you do want to find something that has at least a modicum of, um, function and organization out of the box as well. So you’re not starting completely from scratch. So it’s kind of a sliding scale there as far as customization being something you absolutely want. So the ability to customize, but then subsequently going in and having to having to customize everything can be detrimental in the long run as well. So I know there are a number of products in the market that require a lot of customization. The great thing is you can customize just about everything, but the amount of customization required is a larger lift than a lot of organizations are really looking forward to put in, and they wind up never really getting the true value of what they purchased, right? Um, another part of that is actually going to be asset discovery and getting that baseline of information into the product. Uh, Chris, you want to talk about discovery? Yeah.
Chris Benigni
Yeah, of course. And I think that’s going to be a probably a big focus for this podcast is really and this is how Device42 really helps solve a lot of customer challenges and how we can help enrich the Cmdb. So what really makes advanced cmdb is having asset discovery. So what is asset discovery? It’s the ability to go out there, talk to a device on the network, whether it’s a physical server or a virtual machine or a network device. Think of a switch or a firewall or a Or router or even it could be, you know, a camera or anything, you know. Think of all the IoT devices that are out there on the network. So being able to discover everything that’s out there. So we like to call that the breath of discovery. And then how deep can you go. Can you figure out what firmware is on it. Can you figure out what software is installed on it? Is it talking to something else? Right. So if you’re thinking of like dependency mapping, so that’s another big piece too. So having the ability to have a discovery solution that’s built into your cmdb or that could feed into your cmdb is really what’s going to help make advance that and create more of a standardization, as well as being able to reduce human error and making sure that you’re getting all the information that you need.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
A follow up to that. When it comes to asset discovery, are there products that offer discovery as an add on?
James McFadden
Yeah, actually, uh, there are a number of ITSM platforms that exist as a whole, you know, a solution basically to enable organizational workflows. So, you know, people executing on tickets and tickets and things like that. They’ll often have a cmdb of record built into the product. Um, however, they often leave a lot to be desired. So Device42, for example. Right? Ah, it’s supposed to be the cmdb of record. It wants to be able to discover all the things. Well, as a lot of products that are on the market, they discover a number of things. Maybe, maybe the big ticket items that a lot of organizations are actually looking for, right? So, hey, we’ll pull in windows systems, we’ll pull in Linux systems or something like that. Simple, right? Uh, well, with Device42 we want to get everything about everything. So as much data as we can possibly get regarding your entirety, the entirety of your IT estate. Um, and then on top of that, we really focus on, uh, not only discovery, but getting clean data that’s aggregated from multiple sources of discovery. So an analogy I like to use a lot of times is say you have some kind of a discovery method attacking hypervisor Infrastructure and pulling information back there.
James McFadden
And then you have another discovery method going out and pulling out windows information. Well, it’s very likely that you’re going to get duplicate information between windows VMs on a hypervisor and that same windows VM doing through Windows discovery. Well, what Device42 we actually have a proprietary and patented matching algorithm that will pull in and aggregate that data. So you get unified device records. So being able to paint you a cohesive view of your IT estate without a bunch of duplicate records and then subsequently be able to match up relationships between, hey, this is all the information we found about this particular virtual machine. Oh, it also has a relationship with this hypervisor, and this is the hypervisor that runs it kind of a thing. And being able to have all that information that’s clean, accurate and up to date, uh, is, is really fantastic. Um, Chris, is there anything else you want to get into as far as, um, say matching or aggregation of aggregation of data into device records.
Chris Benigni
Yeah, no, that’s a good point. And well said. And I think, um, you know, that’s it’s that’s a really important thing as you think about it, because it’s really what pushes people away from not using discovery is when they have things that are creating duplications, because at that point, then if you’re doing it manually, at least you’re controlling that. Now again, that that puts you back into a space of is that data accurate? And now that’s becomes more work for for the end user. Right. Um, but another but when you have things working right, you know, as James was saying, and having that matching algorithm, there’s a lot of, um, um, uh, perks to having a discovery solution that can talk to different devices and to help build a bigger picture. So kind of where I’m getting at with that is in device 42. Let’s just say you have, um, let’s just say you have a physical server that’s sitting in a rack. Well, we can scan that device. Let’s say it’s a chassis with blades in it. We can use SNMP protocol to communicate to it, find out the blades that sit in the chassis, the model, what location they’re in, and then maybe they’re running VMware hypervisor or. Hyper-v. So now we can scan them at VMware’s API level or connecting to vCenter. And pull in all the physical, um, you know, physical hosts and find out what the. Rules are that are running on them, what data centers, what vCenter they’re part of.
Chris Benigni
And being able to build a full picture there. Now let’s just say it’s. Connected to a network switch. We can do a discovery against the network switch. Find out what ports those blades are connected to to build that bigger picture. So as you see you having these overlap of jobs, as long as you’re not creating duplication, you’re enriching that data, giving you a full picture. And then you can even go deeper into the to the VMs that are running and finding out what software is installed, what, what connections that are running, what applications are running on them. So now you’re actually taking the physical layer, being able to map that all the way out to an application that’s running on one of the infrastructure that’s being supported on that physical layer. So we’ll talk more about that when we get into relationships. But that’s a that’s a big piece. And that really is really is what makes Device42 the cmdb of record, as James was saying, or the source of truth. Um, you know, it’s being able to capture that data and then also being able to either, you know, showcase that within our cmdb or feed that into an IT ITSM platform, um, or being able to tie that into your security tools or automation orchestration tools and really empowering your organization to be more agile, um, accurate and having reliable data to.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
So, Chris, you mentioned that we’re going to get into some other stuff down the road. Not too much time here, but we’re going to try to cram as much information in as we can get in here. But it really is a learning curve when it comes to cmdbs because there’s just so much information. There’s so many varieties of solutions. Right? So now that we understand a little bit more about some of the caveats between various discovery solutions, what makes Device42 really stand out above the rest?
James McFadden
So I think, uh, first and foremost, the breadth and depth of discovery like hands down. Device42 is the discovery tool. It’s the bar to meet, right? I don’t think any other tools in the market are actually going to compare with it. As far as discovering all of the things at the depth that we do. Um, there’s just no competition there, frankly. Uh, and then being able to say, pull in all the information regarding those assets and build those relationships. Um, Chris, what do you think?
Chris Benigni
Yeah. No, I think that’s I think that’s right. And I think that the big thing, too, is when you have all these, sis, as we talked about a cmdb a big piece of that is the relationships between the Sis. And that’s a very important thing in any decision making process that you’re doing, whether you’re moving a server to the cloud, whether you’re decommissioning a server, you know, whether even you’re just a tech guy that got a phone call and the data center saying, hey, can you recycle this server or this outlet? And you have no idea what’s connected to it, what relationships are there? So that’s a big piece is Device42. We’re also using the using the different methods that we can use to to connect the different devices, we can pull in relationships between services and applications. Um, a network device that’s, that’s plugged into or a server that’s plugged into a switch, um, maybe looking at, um, your, uh, your PDU outlets and being able to trace back and what outlet, um, what device is connected to what outlet and being able to map that out for, for you. Um, and then there’s also the storage side of things. So as you have all these applications that are running, everything needs a place to store the data. So being it’s really important to be able to map that those mounds or those, um, or those disks back to let’s say a Lun or an array. Uh, so that’s something that Device42 can do quite well. And then the last piece, I think James you might want to hit on is just if we can’t store the data in our system, um, it’s just being able to expose that elsewhere.
James McFadden
Yeah. Actually, um, so Device42 is a whole really isn’t designed to be a walled off garden. So we want to aggregate, aggregate all the information from all these different sources and be able to present that to you in a way that’s actually meaningful for your organization. Usually that means feeding that information into another tooling platform. So as Chris was mentioning previously for automation orchestration or for an ITSM platform, devices Device42 ability to feed accurate and up to date data into an ITSM platform to enable accurate workflows for admins, engineers, program managers, and things along those lines, uh enables businesses to move forward effectively as opposed to having to say, okay, we want to do a thing. Okay. Well, now, what’s the even the information that we need in order to get to be able to do the thing? Uh, you already have that information readily available to you. And then integrations like via Rest APIs to enable customization. As far as, uh, integrations are concerned as well. So feeding that data into another platform maybe for security reasons. So maybe you have an alarming platform and you want to make sure that that that alarming platform has accurate data. What’s your IT landscape looks like so it can monitor things appropriately. You know you can’t monitor something that you don’t know about. So discovering all of the devices and then being able to feed that list of things that’s actually kept up to date into monitoring platforms. Huge, huge ordeal there.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
Speaking of huge, I think you’d be hard pressed to find any conversation today surrounding tech of some sort without eye popping up, right? Because it’s everywhere. So with artificial intelligence being such a prominent topic through the entirety of technology industries, is Device42 currently supporting this or planning on leveraging AI technology to enhance the platform?
Chris Benigni
Yeah, and simple answer is yes. Michelle and I do agree. It’s it’s it’s really the the direction of technology today. Um and really it’s not you know, I replacing people. It’s you know, and that’s always a term and it’s something that I heard from someone is it’s more the people using I are going to replace you and your job and, and one of the big things with AI is, is and what Device42 is doing to help focus that is taking the data that we discover and then enriching that even more so when we talk about enriching is, you know, we discover the operating system. So being able to find out end of life and the support for your operating systems, um, being able to normalize vendor data. So again, going back to James point, when you have a cmdb and you have different scans that are running, you know, one scan might see Dell, one Sam might see Dell Inc.. Um, so there’s several different naming conventions. And that’s just the way that they’ll be exposed through different protocols. But how do you normalize that in a system? Or how do you normalize someone who’s just misspelling something, uploading that into the system? And then now what happens is we normalize that data. You use AI to help enrich that process. And the cool thing about that too, is we just recently released Gen AI, which is our reporting engine. Where users now can actually just talk or type in a question. And, and it could be asking for a query or output like a database query. So they don’t have to be a DBA and they can get an output that they want. Um, or just being able to get any type of feedback, um, like, like ChatGPT to say, hey, give me the answer to this. So it’s definitely the future for Device42, and then we’ll be doing some cool things in the future and really focusing on enriching that some more, and getting into software and hardware and being able to bring in a lot of that end of life and support information.
James McFadden
Yeah, I actually just want to pivot off of that real quick as well. Chris. So like, why why is that really important? Right. Yeah. Every organization on planet Earth is is looking to be more effective. So less people, more output. Right. So less human hours being put in and getting more value from those human hours. Right. Um, and adding AI technology into our platform is going to be critical for that. So say, for example, you were in a situation where you were in a data center hosting provider or something along those lines, and you needed to run some report on, say, Cisco devices. Well, Cisco has kind of been notorious for this previously. But like if you look at Cisco devices from ten years ago, maybe it was labeled as something from Cisco Systems or Cisco Inc. or Cisco LLC. And maybe you miss one of those, right? And you don’t actually get an accurate report because you didn’t know, oh, I need this particular kind of name. But having an AI generated report that says, oh, hey, we need to actually gather everything that involves everything from Cisco in entirety of the timeline of Cisco being in our infrastructure. That really, really helps and accelerates that timeline as well. And you can say, hey, I want this report based off this criteria with these vendors. Give me all of the things. And having that report generated without you having to spend a lot of time in Excel spreadsheets and, and trying to figure out figure out mapping of, hey, we have this, this many of this version, that version, etc. and being able to produce that report in seconds as opposed to hours and hours of labor. I mean, that just the productivity increase is incalculable there.
Chris Benigni
Yeah. And I think, you know, so it really and it really does help with visibility, understanding your environment, you know, and and the big thing is the risk factor too and security angle. So you know, think about a lot of compliance and audits that customers have to go through today. Um, it’s really surfacing. Um, you know, the goal for them and auditor is to come in and find out, you know, what are some of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in your environment. And these are things that you can be more proactive about being able to identify these risks. You know, knowing, hey, I have a business application that’s running on infrastructure that’s out of date or has end of life. Um, so now you’ve exposed that open to vulnerabilities, that if there is something that accesses the network, they don’t have the right patching because they’ve been out of out of support, out of life. Right. So that’s another angle. And then even just improving IT operations and other business initiatives. So, you know, the whole point of what James is talking about there is really helping around reducing mttr, too, and being able to help with any type of transformation activity, whether you’re moving to the cloud, whether you’re adopting new technology, just doing hardware or software refreshes, having better visibility in your state, but then being able to get that AI to help enrich that information is what’s going to give you that 360 view of what’s happening there.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
Yeah, and I do just have to reiterate what you said earlier, Chris, because I think it’s such a great point. People not being replaced by AI, but the people who are not using AI will be replaced by the people who are using it because it clearly is is taking over everything, and it can be so useful and so beneficial if used in the right way. So here we are about to wrap up. Hard to believe we’ve already gone through so much time and there’s still so much to get to. But if you had to choose just a few bullet point key takeaways to leave our audience with today, what would that be? And then any resources or places they can reach out. If they have any more questions and would like to learn more?
Chris Benigni
Sure. Yeah. Michelle, I can start and James, if you want to chime in. So I think that, you know, looking back at the at what we’ve discussed, you know, when you think of advanced cmdb solution, it really it’s it’s something that provides better out of the box capabilities. You know, don’t don’t, um, you want to find something that’s going to be, um, useful that time to value. And it also allows for flexibility and customization. So, you know, things that will, can that will allow you to add custom fields that will allow you to track the information that you need to track and not have to settle with, um, you know, workarounds. And on top of that too, is really having strong asset discovery and being able to automate a lot of relationships with with SSIS. This is something that you just possibly can’t do manually, and if you do, it’s not going to be accurate. It’s going to change constantly. So you want to make sure that you have that being aware of, you know, what’s on the network, where it is, where it’s located, what it’s connected to. Um, and then obviously identifying a lot of those of those relationships.
James McFadden
Yeah. I think, you know, one of the big takeaways, at least for me, uh, is, is that, you know, managing a cmdb doesn’t have to be hard, right? Everybody who’s who’s managing their own cmdb through legacy processes, you know, humans having to follow a list of steps in order to accomplish a goal, right? That’s laborious. It’s it’s a giant pain. And ultimately, humans make mistakes. And so you’re going to have flawed data, right? So minimizing those mistakes, minimizing that flawed data and not making it hard on yourself is is going to be a major factor here. And I think Device42 really positions itself in the market to help accommodate for those things. So, um, having better, uh, mean time to value as far as deploying this product in your organization and then actually getting valuable data in short order, especially with the breadth and the depth of discovery that that Device42 can provide. Um, that’s going to be massive for just about any organization.
Chris Benigni
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s important to note, when I was referring to discovery, it’s not just any discovery. It’s really having advanced discovery. You know, what good is it to only capture 70% of your environment? You want to be able to capture everything that’s running out there. Um, you know, and having products like Device42 Best of Breed in your organization, um, it will allow your organization to be more agile. It’ll allow you to think more proactively and allow you to really execute on a lot of the business initiatives. Um, and looking at how to improve processes that you’re doing today. Um, and, you know, with that said, um, I would encourage you guys to see a demo of Device42. You can go to Device42. Com. Um, there’s a way to just try it for free right at the top. But you could also sign up for a free demo. Uh, you’ll have a live person that’s actually doing doing that demonstration, if you have any questions, too. Um, you can just send an email over to [email protected], and they’ll route you to any direction that you need. Um, and that’s it from our side. Michelle, I thank you for that.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
No. Sounds great. As I said, we had to get a lot of lot of information in a short amount of time, so I’m glad you gave those resources there. I want to thank both of my guests today. Device42 Chris Bonini, director of Solutions Architects, and James McFadden, Senior Solutions architect. Appreciate you being here. Appreciate your time. A lot of good stuff happening and hopefully people will be able to find out more answers and get some more resources with all the information that you put out there. So thank you for being here today.
James McFadden
Awesome. Appreciate it Michelle.
Michelle Dawn Mooney
And I want to thank all of you for tuning in and listening to the ultimate guide to the Device42 Configuration Management Database, or Cmdb podcast series. And of course, you can visit Device42 website. As Chris mentioned, for more information on everything we talked about today. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. We hope to connect with you on another podcast soon.