CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Objective:
Providing information on the IT infrastructure to all other processes and IT management.
Enabling control of the infrastructure by monitoring and maintaining information on all the resources needed to deliver services

Process of Configuration Management:
• Planning.
• Identification and naming.
• Control.
• Status accounting.
• Verification & audit.
· Update CMDB – Configuration Management Database

Procedure of Configuration Management:
• Plan for Configuration Management databases and activities
• Identify Configuration Items
• Control Configuration Item information
• Perform status accounting
• Perform verification and audit of Configuration Management databases
• Provide management information about Configuration Management quality and operations

Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

• Managing Configuration Item information end to end of IT infrastructure.
• Providing capability to perform risk analysis of changes and releases performed.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Managing Configuration Item Information end to end of IT Infrastructure
• Number of Configuration Items logged and tracked
• Number of Configuration Items with attribute failures
• Number of changes to Configuration Item attributes
• Number of additional Configuration Items
• Number of deletions of Configuration Items
• Number and frequency of exceptions in configuration audits

Providing Capability to Perform Risk Analysis of Changes and Releases performed
• Number of incidents caused by inaccurate configuration data
• Percentage of Services tracked with Configuration Items versus known products and services

Advantage of Configuration Management:
• Provides accurate information on Configuration Items (CIs) and their documentation
• Controls valuable CIs
• Facilitates adherence to legal obligations
• Helps with financial and expenditure planning
• Making software changes visible
• Contributes to contingency planning
• Supporting and improving Release management
• Allowing the organization to perform impact analysis and schedule changes safely and efficiently
• Providing problem management with data on trends

Are tools required for Managing CMDB?
Yes, Software tool is key to maintain CMDB especially for large infrastructure. Most of the organizations require a Configuration management-based tool, capable of storing all relevant configuration items (CIs) and should have the following facilities:
• Problems, RFCs are stored upon the same database in an easily accessible format.
• The ability to identify the relationship among CIs (physical and logical), and between CIs and RFCs, RFCs and Problems, RFCs and CI

Finally Configuration Management stands to identify, record and report on configuration items and their relationships for IT services.