Managing Configuration Items › CI Reconciliation

CI Reconciliation

Reconciliation helps ensure that updates from multiple data sources that refer to the same business object only update a single CI, even if they possess different identifying information. Ambiguity represents the possibility that a CI is not unique. CIs are ambiguous when they represent the same real business object. CI transactions are ambiguous when they have more than one possible target CI. Ambiguous CIs can lead to incorrect data in the CMDB, which negates the value of the CMDB and can lead to incorrect business actions.

Automatic CI reconciliation is a key CA CMDB advantage that saves significant time compared with manual data maintenance. The process of reconciling CIs uses several specific identifying attributes. However, automatic reconciliation can result in the following:

• False positive matches

  Existing CIs are updated instead of creating a CI.

• False negative matches

  New CIs are created instead of updating an existing CI. The set of CIs with similar identifying attributes are ambiguous because they resemble the same real business object with similar identifying attributes.

CA Service Desk Manager supports the following reconciliation approaches:

• MDR-Based Reconciliation (Passive)

  Allow the CMDB to reconcile any ambiguous data based on the MDR-Based Reconciliation process.

• Identify and Resolve ambiguous CIs (Reactive)

  Identify and resolve ambiguous CIs through identification and management of existing CIs in the CMDB.

• Review and modify inbound data using a transaction work area (Proactive)

  Review and modify inbound data before loading into the CMDB using a transaction work area (TWA).

Each approach has strengths and weaknesses.