Overview

A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of asset information defining the critical configuration items in your environment and their relationships. A service catalog fits into that framework as a tool to help with financial governance, workflow, management of service requests, service definition, and other important tasks. The closer the relationship between the infrastructure assets represented by the configuration items and the logical services consumed by users, the more useful the integration between the CMDB and the service catalog is to your organization.

CA CMDB is a comprehensive, integrated solution for managing an enterprise's IT components and services and their relationships, in heterogeneous computing environments. CA CMDB makes it possible to provide and store reliable, up-to-date details on assets, known as configuration items, and their relationships with each other. These relationships form the basis for impact analysis, an important tool for controlling change within an organization.

Using the Visualizer component of CA CMDB with the Request UI and Services UI components of CA Service Catalog, you can find the connections between IT and business. From these connections, you can follow the paths that lead to the details you need to determine a comprehensive impact analysis when any configuration item suffers a partial or total loss of operation.

When CA CMDB and CA Service Catalog are integrated, CA Service Catalog services are associated with configuration items in CA CMDB. Using the CA CMDB Visualizer, you can trace the dependencies of the services on other configuration items. You can therefore determine the impact of configuration items on services. One of the most important applications occurs when a configuration item used by one or more services either suffers loss of performance or stops working completely. You can visually pinpoint the impact of this event to the service.

When a specific change affects a configuration item, you can use the CA CMDB impact analysis tools to figure out which services are affected by the change. Then you can use CA Service Catalog to determine the organizations and users that have subscribed to the impacted services. This information helps you plan the change you need. Also, you can use the service level agreements between the subscribing organization and the providers to help plan the change. For example, if a heavily used server slows down or crashes, you can determine the impact on CA Service Catalog services by using the integration to help answer questions like the following:

Which specific services use that server?
Do those services use any other server?
Are other servers available to replace the affected server?
Which accounts and subscriptions are affected?
What are the possible financial risks? For example: do the affected services or configuration items have associated service-level agreements (SLAs)? Do the impacted services help generate revenue?

Your analysis can include impact analysis, efficiency analysis, financial analysis and profitability, and ITIL considerations. Both CA CMDB and CA Service Catalog support ITIL principles.