ITIL Solutions: ITIL Based Service Management

ITIL Configuration Management

The following overview describes the fundamentals of ITIL Configuration Management. Also read how infraEnterprise supports Configuration Management.

Traditionally Asset Management has been used to control assets within an organization. This method of control is mainly built around the location and accounting aspects of assets.

Within the ITIL system, Asset Management becomes much more. Configuration Management controls not only the aspects covered by Asset Management, but also identifies the nature and importance of relationships between assets (configuration items).

The role of the infraEnterprise Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is to identify, control, maintain and verify configuration items (CIs) within your organization. The quality of data within your CMDB will affect the efficiency and effectiveness of your entire service management strategy and impacts on all areas of IT Service Management (ITSM).

The main activities of Configuration Management are:

Planning - planning and defining the scope, objectives, policy and processes of the CMDB.
Identification - selecting and identifying the configuration structures and items within the scope of your IT infrastructure. This includes owners, attributes, dependencies and relationships between configuration items.
Configuration Control - ensuring that only authorized and identifiable configuration items are accepted and recorded in the CMDB throughout its lifecycle. Control of CIs can be strictly controlled within infraEnterprise through its officer/group role permissions and Change Management process.
Status Accounting - keeping track of the status of components throughout the entire lifecycle of configuration items e.g. from ‘In Production’ to ‘off-line’ and ‘retired’. In infraEnterprise, Status is a pre-defined attribute within CIs.
Verification and Audit – auditing after the implementation of configuration management to verify that the correct information is recorded in the CMDB, followed by scheduled audits to ensure the CMDB is kept up to date.

The relationship of Configuration Management to other ITIL processes

The CMDB has relationships with IT service management processes in the following areas.

ITIL Incident Management

Configuration Management assists Incident Management by:

providing the Service Desk with immediate information on the CIs affected, and more timely resolution of faults by understanding what CIs have been affected and changed.

ITIL Problem Management

Configuration Management assists Problem Management by:

linking the CIs affected by problems to the incident / problem / change management processes, and ensuring the CI status is properly maintained.

ITIL Change Management

Configuration Management assists Change Management by:

recording which CIs have been changed and controlling the status of CIs throughout the entire CI lifecycle. Configuration Management ensures any changes made to CIs are recorded and kept accurate.

ITIL Service Level Management

Configuration Management assists Service Level Management by:

Identifying which affected CIs (including services) are related to active Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The set-up plan and ongoing maintenance strategy for your organization’s CMDB is therefore critical in supporting your entire IT Service Management infrastructure, and will either limit or support the success of your other processes.