Managing Configuration Items › CA CMDB Data Maintenance › Extending CA CMDB
Extending CA CMDB
CA CMDB is a highly flexible system that can be extended to include additional families, classes, and attributes according to your business needs. New attributes can be family-specific or common (applicable across all families). While CA CMDB provides predefined families with many classes and attributes based on industry standards, some business cases require one or more of the following activities:
- Extend one or more of the CI families by adding new attributes. For example, to add a GPS coordinate for every device on your office campus, you can define a gps_coordinate attribute to add to any desired family. If you only want to extend one family, use Web Screen Painter Schema Designer to define the new attributes in the existing extension table. In addition, whenever you add an attribute, you also must modify the Detail page, Attribute tab, and metadata forms that use the attribute. For more information, see Add Family Attributes.
- Extend all CI families by adding a common attribute. For more information, see Add Common Attributes.
- Add new classes to an existing family to support more classification detail in your system. For example, instead of the generic Server class, you can create a separate class for every model of server device. For more information, see Define a New CI Class.
- Add a new family by using an existing extension table and its attributes. A new family provides an alternative way of organizing or classifying CIs. For more information, see Define a New CI Family.
- If the existing class or family structure does not match your requirements, you can start over with a minimum set of attributes. If you want to add a new family using a new extension table, define the new extension table and its attributes using Web Screen Painter Schema Designer and also create the forms that are required for display and update. For more information, see Constructing a New Attribute Framework.
Important: Extending CA CMDB requires specialized knowledge of CA SDM data structures and tables, and familiarity with Web Screen Painter (WSP). We recommend that you contact CA Services to assist in this activity and also read and understand thoroughly the following sections before attempting to extend CA CMDB families and attributes.
