Technical White PaperBUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Novell® myCMDB™ Solution Overview

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Novell myCMDB Solution Overview

Table of Contents: 2 . . . . . Introduction

3 . . . . . Overview of Novell myCMDB

11 . . . . . Summary

11 . . . . . About Novell

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By delivering key capabilities that make CMDB visualization, navigation, search, analysis and reporting measurably easier and more intuitive, Novell myCMDB positions internal IT organizations and service providers alike with the capability to tackle today’s complex configuration management demands.

The value of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is commonly accepted across a wide spectrum of IT professionals today, especially as a vehicle to lower the risk of outages caused by planned changes to the IT infrastructure—which account for up to 60 percent of all IT outages in a typical large IT enterprise. By having a complete and up-to-date model of Configuration Item (CI) attributes and relationships, IT organi-zations can readily analyze and understand the impact of potential changes to the IT infrastructure—before they’re implemented in production.

And yet, while CMDB adoption rates are sharply on the rise, many of these projects will fail because of CMDB data inaccuracy, poor usability or lack of widespread usage across the IT enterprise. Why is this happening?

A CMDB project can be a complex undertak-ing—especially in today’s world of distributed IT technology. And while CMDB and appli-cation dependency mapping technology advances can automate substantial portions of CMDB creation and maintenance, success-ful projects require the right balance of people, process and technology—all working together to ensure change process compliance and, ultimately, CMDB data accuracy.

For CMDB projects to receive enterprise-wide adoption they’ll need to be absolutely accurate and trusted repositories. This will require wide user adoption across IT and the business to ensure all knowledge about the IT infrastructure is captured within the CMDB. Gaining broad user adoption will necessitate new levels in usability, accessibility, analytics and visualization to capture and hold the interest of IT and corporate users.

Novell® myCMDB™ solves CMDB data accuracy, usability and accessibility issues incumbent with today’s CMDB implementa-tions, while providing a powerful solution for modeling and analyzing planned changes to the IT infrastructure. myCMDB is a first-to- market Web-based application that combines Web 2.0 and structured social networking principles to significantly enhance enterprise CMDB usability, accessibility and accuracy—for any CMDB project.

By combining Facebook* interactivity and Google* context-based search capabilities with advanced analytics and reporting, the CMDB is transformed into a more valuable, user-friendly environment which, in turn, drives greater usage across the enterprise. And, just as with the Wikipedia* information quality management model, when more users contribute to the CMDB, it naturally becomes a more accurate representation of the actual IT infrastructure.

By delivering key capabilities that make CMDB visualization, navigation, search, analysis and reporting measurably easier and more intuitive, Novell myCMDB posi-tions internal IT organizations and service providers alike with the capability to tackle today’s complex configuration management demands. One perfect example is the cloud computing infrastructure. With myCMDB, organizations have the power to effectively manage cloud-based configurations and answer critical infrastructure questions— like “where and on what is my workload running?” This effectively lowers the risks inherent in changing these complex environ-ments while offering greater transparency at the same time.

Introduction

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Novell myCMDB Solution Overview www.novell.com

myCMDB leads a new era of Business Service Management (BSM) solutions focused on humanizing IT, improving IT service quality and “Making IT Work As One™.” In the following sections of this paper, we’ll discuss myCMDB capabilities and the value it provides to today’s IT enterprise.

Overview of Novell myCMDBTo address today’s CMDB challenges, myCMDB integrates principles of Web 2.0 and structured social networking—coupled with advanced analytics and modeling—into a brand new Web-based application that is designed specifically to enhance CMDB interaction, analysis and visualization.

Why all the emphasis on CMDB usability and interaction? As enterprise CMDBs grow to a million CIs or more, it’s no surprise that navigating this vast amount of data can be a complex and difficult task—one that renders traditional user interfaces and navigation systems unusable. Consider for a moment, traversing through a large CMDB imple-mentation where hierarchical tree structures may contain millions of elements—many of which may be nested 15 or 20 levels deep. Navigating such a structure becomes a challenge to all but the most adept IT user.

Novell myCMDB Communities and Home Page

To enhance CMDB navigation and interac-tion myCMDB leverages the fundamental social networking concept of “community” to establish logical, role-based views of CMDB data. Each myCMDB community consists of logically related CMDB data—grouped by function, role, class or geography. IT or business users subscribe to CMDB commu-

nities—usually based on their specific busi-ness responsibility. Within each community, users can quickly and intuitively search and report on CMDB information—leveraging ad hoc or bookmarked queries, as well as pre-defined reports that can be launched with a few mouse clicks.

Community-defined governance gives users needed access capabilities while ensuring that actual CMDB updates are controlled by authorized configuration management personnel. Within myCMDB there are essen-tially two types of CMDB users. The first are “consumers” who are typically business or IT users that only require access to the CMDB to help carry out their jobs.

Consider for a moment, a facilities manager seeking to understand how required power supply maintenance will affect mission-critical business applications, or simply the finance assistant looking to formulate an accurate count of laptops in a specific line of business.

myCMDB consumer users do not have permission to change actual CMDB infor-mation but may “flag” data that is incorrect. It then becomes the job of the “producer” to make the actual change.

“Producers” represent the second type of CMDB user within a myCMDB community. Producers are typically asset, change or configuration managers who need control over the actual CMDB data itself. Producers are able to contribute to the community by creating and maintaining CI information. They also have the ability to save searches and reports and share them across one or more communities.

Why all the emphasis on CMDB usability and interaction? As enterprise CMDBs grow to a million CIs or more, it’s no surprise that navigating this vast amount of data can be a complex and difficult task—one that renders traditional user interfaces and navigation systems unusable.

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From the home page itself, users have easy access to such community information and capabilities as CI counts, recent CI searches or updates, as well as important communication updates between community users.

Novell myCMDB Tag Cloud

The myCMDB Tag Cloud provides an instant reference and access to individual CI classes, counts and attributes. Within the Tag Cloud area each CI class is listed followed by a count of the number of CIs of this class type. Clicking on a class type provides instant access to the individual CIs within a specific class type. The Tag Cloud area can be customized to show a variety of different CMDB information.

Novell myCMDB Inbox and Community Updates

Just like traditional e-mail inboxes, the myCMDB inbox provides an easy mechanism for community users to communicate about recent or upcoming changes to the CMDB. This comes in handy when a planned IT configuration change raises questions about the impact on other services, applications or IT elements within the enterprise.

The Community Update area provides up-to-the-minute activity listings for each CI change within the CMDB. View actual or proposed CMDB changes along with items flagged in error.

Novell myCMDB Pinboard

myCMDB Pinboard provides an intelligent and convenient “clipboard” feature for keep-ing track of recently viewed CMDB data, as well as bookmarked queries and reports. This feature saves valuable time for users that need to perform repetitive searches or produce custom reports. To save CMDB search data, simply drag it to the Pinboard. Likewise, to bookmark a search or report, just drag it to the Pinboard. Bookmarked items are persisted across sessions. Return-ing to a bookmarked item is just a mouse click away.

As seen below on the myCMDB home page, communities provide the gateway to a wealth of CMDB information and analytics. From the home page itself, users have easy access to such community information and capabilities as CI counts, recent CI searches or updates, as well as important communication updates between community users.

To see the real power of myCMDB, let’s take a closer look at the individual areas, features and the major capabilities available to users via the home page below:

Figure 1. myCMDB Home Page

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Novell myCMDB Solution Overview www.novell.com

CMDB Governance

CMDB change management governance is controlled within myCMDB by basically three different mechanisms. The first is through authentication security control built into myCMDB. Using the community rules you define, strict access control is main-tained for both myCMDB as well as each community within it. In addition, each user is assigned specific authorization rules—either as a Producer or Consumer of CMDB

information (see myCMDB Communities for more detail).

In this way, users are restricted to making only those changes to the CMDB for which they are authorized. The final mechanism for changing CMDB data comes through the built-in data “flagging” capability of myCMDB. Through the use of flags, users can identify specific CI data that is either in error or tar geted for change. An example of CMDB flagging is shown here:

Figure 2. Example of CMDB Flagging

In this example, a specific CI is flagged as having been reviewed and is now ready for the next step in the change management process. In this way, myCMDB flagging not only acts as a governor of CMDB changes but also can act as a critical mechanism for controlling changes to traditional change management systems as well. For instance, by leveraging the myCMDB Producer vs. Consumer concept, Change Control Board (CCB) members can be given spe-cific CMDB change control rights via Producer-defined rules. In doing this, the CCB can act as the final controlling authority for all RFCs (requests for change) as well as elements flagged within the CMDB.

Finally, myCMDB provides built-in support of the Common Information Model, or CIM. CI data input can be governed by rules based off of the existing CIM model or in addition thereto.

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Users have essentially three separate ways to easily access CMDB data. The first is through a one-click drill-down using the Tag Cloud (as described in an earlier section). The second by the basic contextual search mechanism as defined above. And the third is through the Advanced Search window. Advanced searching allows users to specify searches leveraging basic Boolean logic coupled with a variety of data filtering criteria.

Intermediate searches can be further nar-rowed by clicking on the additional filtering or matching criteria.

Additionally, intermediate search results can be further refined through additional search criteria or moved to the Pinboard and saved for later. Pinboarded data can even be con-catenated with additional search results.

Novell myCMDB Search

myCMDB simplifies CMDB search by removing the need for hierarchical tree navigation. Rather, myCMDB steals a page from Google’s context-based search capability by allowing users to search the CMDB contextually based criteria. Take for example the user who needs to find information about a specific server, but doesn’t have the specific data to clearly identify that server. This is not a problem in myCMDB—simply click on the Search tab in the home page and type in “server.” myCMDB produces a list of all CIs that match the desired criteria. In this case, the user would be presented with a screen much like the following:

Figure 3. myCMDB Search Results

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Novell myCMDB Solution Overview www.novell.com

Novell myCMDB Analytics and Reporting

myCMDB offers a variety of built-in analytics and reports—all fully-customizable and avail-able directly from the home page. By using its intuitive visualization capabilities, myCMDB users have easy access to a complete detailed view of attribute and rela tionship information—see screenshots below.

And because the myCMDB environment is fully interactive, each element in these views can be manipulated and/or drilled into for greater detail.

This comes in handy when it’s necessary to traverse CI dependency maps. With myCMDB impact analysis is fast and easy, simply zoom in or out or drag your way through CI relationships.

Figure 4. CI Detail and Relationship Views

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To complement its built-in analytics, myCMDB offers a full line of pre-defined reports for viewing or comparing specific CI attribute details. Examples of these reports include:

CI Details—shows CI information for one or more selected CIs

CI Summary (Flags)—shows the list of flags for each CI

CI Summary (5 column)—shows the values of specified attributes for each CI

CI Summary (Multiple Attributes)—shows the values of multiple attributes for each CI

In addition, complete historical detail for each CI is available through the CI history viewer (see screenshot below). Using this intuitive viewer, users can interact with and examine the complete change history for each CI.

Figure 5. CI History Viewer

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Novell myCMDB Solution Overview www.novell.com

In addition to being able to customize pre-defined report attributes, users have a full complement of tools to fulfill their own custom reporting needs. Completed custom reports can be used individually or shared across the community of users.

Novell myCMDB Modeling

myCMDB offers a sophisticated new modeling environment called myWorkspace, which is a personal “sandbox” where users can analyze and manipulate CMDB data—without affecting critical production con-figurations. This is also a great place for developing searches and reports that you are not ready to share with other users. myWorkspace can be used for:

Getting a head-start defining CMDB components that are not yet in production

Creating a basic CI type for a popular CMDB component that can be copied out to multiple communities and then customized

Creating standard type searches and reports that can be used as “templates” that are further customized when copied into a community

Developing searches and reports that are not visible to community members until they are finalized

Since myWorkspace is a private area, modi-fied CIs, searches and reports eventually will need to be pushed to “production.” To do this, myWorkspace CIs, searches and reports can simply be moved to the Pinboard or copied into a different community.

Figure 6. myCMDB Reports

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System Requirements

myCMDB supports the following operating system platforms:

Solaris* Linux* Windows* (both 32 bit and 64 bit)

While myCMDB works with a number of different CMDB solutions, it requires the Novell Business Service Manager server instance from which it derives critical metadata infor-mation. While myCMDB may be installed on a different physical server than the Business Service Manager server, the myCMDB server must resolve to the Busi ness Service Manager server for communications.

myCMDB utilizes the Novell Web 2.0 Connect architecture for communications to/from the Busi ness Service Manager server. CI class libraries, imported into the Busi ness Service Manager server, are leveraged by myCMDB for custom properties and CMDB structure information. myCMDB ships with an embed-ded Tomcat Server 6.0 and the myCMDB application resides as a .war file in the Tomcat server.

At installation, myCMDB communication settings are specified to establish the com-munications channel with the Busi ness Service Manager server.

Novell myCMDB Architecture

Novell myCMDB is an application that works in conjunction with a number of CMDB systems including Novell CMDB360 (see diagram below). This makes myCMDB a perfect com plement to any Configuration Management System (CMS).

Figure 7. myCMDB Architecture

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Novell myCMDB Solution Overview www.novell.com

SummaryAlmost everyone accepts the importance of the CMDB today—especially as a vehicle to lower the risk of outages caused by planned or unplanned changes to the IT infrastructure. Even so, a CMDB project is a daunting undertaking—especially in today’s world of complex IT technology.

More importantly, successful CMDB projects require input and participation across a broad range of IT professionals—from the configu-ration management team responsible for building the CMDB to each person respon-sible for the federated data sources that supply data to the CMDB—including service support and service delivery managers, application managers and asset database owners, to name a few.

This is critical to ensure all essential informa-tion about the IT infrastructure is captured within the CMDB.

Through its unique approach of integrating Web 2.0 structured social networking prin-ciples Novell myCMDB offers a revolutionary new and easy way for users to view, navigate, analyze, update and interact with their CMDB— and with other users as well. With myCMDB, companies can realize the complete value of their CMDB projects by:

Ensuring better, more accurate visibility across your IT infrastructure

Lowering the risks associated with changes to the IT infrastructure

Improving the IT change management process (with optional adapters)

Creating a trusted source of IT information between IT and the business

Increasing CMDB ROI to the business

About Novell Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers the best- engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit: www.novell.com

Through its unique approach of integrating Web 2.0 structured social networking principles Novell myCMDB offers a revolutionary new and easy way for users to view, navigate, analyze, update and interact with their CMDB—and with other users as well.

www.novell.com

Contact your local Novell Solutions Provider, or call Novell at:

1 800 714 3400 U.S./Canada1 801 861 1349 Worldwide1 801 861 8473 Facsimile

Novell, Inc.404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 USA

462-002114-001 | 03/09 | © 2009 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo and the N logo are registered trademarks, and Making IT Work As One and myCMDB are trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

*All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Novell Logo1 The registered trademark, ®,

appears to the right and on thesame baseline as the Logo.

Minimum Size RequirementsThe Novell Logo should NOT beprinted smaller than 3 picas(0.5 inches or 12.5 mm) in width.

Clear-space Requirements2 Allow a clean visual separation

of the Logo from all other elements.The height of the "N" is themeasurement for the minimumclear-space requirements aroundthe Logo. This space is flat andunpatterned, free of other designelements and clear from the edgeof the page.

3 picas(0.5 in)

(12.5 mm)

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