Managing Configuration Items › Versioning

Versioning

Versioning promotes control over the IT infrastructure by tracking and managing the life cycles of all the CIs that make up the authorized state of the CMDB. Versioning also applies to auditing the history of an object. Versioning provides the following functions to control the IT infrastructure:

Snapshots

Recorded automatically for changes that you made to the value of any update to an object, such as when you update a CI. Versioning creates a snapshot that records the complete state of the hardware CI after the memory size of a computer is modified. Versioning can display the snapshot and can indicate which CI attributes have changed. Versioning can also compare it against all other historical snapshots of that CI. You require this critical information when you want to understand the impact of changes on the availability and performance of a CI.

Milestones

Recorded as special-purpose snapshots with a user-defined label, such as First Day of Production or January Baseline. These labels can help find specific snapshots more quickly.

Important! Milestones do not apply to change specifications, verification policies, managed change states, and managed attributes.

Comparisons

Compare a CI to another CI that acts as a standard. You can use any CI as a standard for comparison purposes, but we recommend that you dedicate specific CIs for the purpose of acting as Standard CIs. A Standard CI lets you define a standard configuration to which other operational CIs in the same family can be compared. For example, an organization can decide to define Server Large as a Standard CI to define the attribute values that define this type of server. The Standard CI for a family can be made an attribute of an operational CI in that family, which lets you compare the current state or any historical state of a CI to its associated standard configuration. Like other comparisons, you can print this information or export it as a comma-delimited file.

Whereas milestones can act as unshared, unchangeable baselines, Standard CIs provide shared, dynamic baselines for your CIs.

Important! A Standard CI must never contain values for any attribute that is used for CI reconciliation.

Change Specifications

View pending scheduled or unscheduled change specifications that a user specified for Change Orders for the CI. You can compare the change specification with the current state of the CI. For example, compare a planned value to the current state of a CI. This comparison can show conflicts with changes, identify overlapping changes in the schedule, and so on.

Versioning lets you complete the following tasks:

• Automatic capture of all CI modifications
• Snapshots of a CI at any time based on date or attribute changes
• Various levels of display including detailed Log, Basic, and Advanced views
• Multiple attribute comparisons with other snapshots, user-defined milestones for CIs, or a Standard CI
• Automatic snapshots whenever CA SDM change tickets change states

  Note: This automatic snapshot does not apply to change specifications, verification policies, managed change states, and managed attributes.

• Advanced filtering and comparison with Print and CSV Export support

More information:

Uses of Versioning

Shared Asset and CI Audit Trail Records

Versioning Terminology

Sources of Versioning Data

CA SDM Change Management Integration

CA APM Integration

CI Versioning Management

CA SDM Change Management

Configuration Audit and Control Facility (CACF)

CI Versioning and Future State