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Posts Tagged ‘Asset management’
Facing the Dell laptop with a Sony battery recall… can a CMDB help?
So, was your laptop affected by the recent Sony battery recall? I have a Dell Latitude D600 and had to check the serial number but fortunately the battery number did not match those on the recall website that you check to see if you need to get a new one.
Now, if a CMDB had contained the serial number of my battery, could I have been saved that extra step? It’s a question of granularity for the CMDB – when would you kick yourself for not going more granular on your CMDB? And is it possible to think of all scenarios such as this, especially for all hardware parts that go into laptops and servers and desktops? I sincerely doubt it’s worth the trouble… until something like this recall comes up and then I wonder.
It seems like entering all that information into your CMDB is not worth it for these rare exceptions when you want the information. Until the information could be automatically discovered somehow, it’s just as easy to have your end-users look it up for themselves. If the serial number information was available from the manufacturers or through discovery, it could be a federated attribute in an Asset Management database rather than stored in the CMDB. But, for a level of granularity that helps you pinpoint a subset of your entire collection of hardware, you could use the CMDB to help you determine who might be affected, based on who has laptops or who has Dell laptops with the exact model numbers that are affected. This sounds like a sensible and balanced approach.
How about you? Any ideas on the practicality of granularity for these recall situations? What is the next step — Change Management for tracking all the replaced batteries?
Updated to add: Here’s a link to a relevant podcast with Tom Bishop, where he talks about the relativity of data. Thanks to Ynema’s comment I can get even more familiar with the best approaches to these types of CMDB design questions.
Delayed report from the BMC Forum about Discovering Configuration Items (CIs)
Observations on discovery technology based on sitting in on the BMC IT Discovery Suite presentation at last month’s BMC Forum
Tools for discovering your IT assets are a new area to me, so if I get the technology all wrong, let me know. I attended this session Wednesday of the BMC Forum after having breakfast with some cool people who work in change management at Temple Inland here in Austin (Stephen, one of the brothers in the photo from this post is one of them). They all had Blackberries which seems to be the support gadget of choice — my husband the system administrator carries one as well. I’ll get back to the Blackberries as part of the IT discovery in a minute.
Mike Ramos, a technical services expert who works in Dallas, presented to about 40 attendees. He offered methods for answering the questions, What assets do I have? How are assets related? How are assets configured? An example of a customer request he’s helped with: “I need a quick asset count of the 20,000 desktops I’ve got, plus I need patch management for those 20,000 desktops in less than 3 to 4 weeks, can it be done?” His answer is “Yes, and here’s an overview of how to do it.”
BMC offers Marimba Configuration Discovery for configuration discovery when you want to gain visibility and control over IT assets, so it’s agent based. BMC Discovery Express (he also called it Dex) populates and validates the CMDB with inventory of deployed assets (agentless) using SNMP v1 or v2 (items like a switch, router, or firewall) but doesn’t know about relationship info, so the third piece is BMC Topology Discovery, which tells you the connections. I’m probably completely confused on what you can buy as a package, but your sales rep could help you figure it out, or poke around on the links I’ve embedded.
Questions and answers from this session include:
Q: Can you marry the application to the network things that you know about?
A: Yes, any topology you already know about can be configured.
Q: Can you add connections to servers in the map by hand?
A: Yes, it’s in a right-click menu.
Q: What is that Route to Value graphic?
A: The Route to Value graphic shows categories of the methods you can use to achieve Business Service Management. Marimba works in the Change and Configuration Management Route to Value, but the other two products work in the Asset Management and Discovery Route to Value. I think that just goes to show you that you don’t have to take just one route to get to value.
Q: Are there any gotchas in a VMWare or UNIX partition environment in terms of discovery?
A: As you might guess, VMWare can have issues because of the display aspect, causing you to have to customize the view, but
there is an expert module for VMWare / Citrix is due in a November patch of the product.
Q: What about discovery of handhelds?
A: There are workarounds for Blackberry and Palm devices, but PocketPC is the only officially supported discoverable device.
So that’s how I’ve returned to the ubiquitous Blackberry. I also want to let the Marimba folks know that your radio transmitter/receiver/repeater analogy is quite good in my eyes. It scales well and seems to be familiar to most people. I’ve been explaining architecture for distributed system for about five years now, and your analogies make the best diagrams I’ve seen.
Ah ha! Discovery along your route
Discussing what is a route to value, anyway?
I just started on a Routes To Value writing team this summer, and I had a lot to read just to try to wrap my head around a route to value. What is a route to value? Why were they created?
A Route To Value is basically a bite-sized, somewhat more manageable chunk of Business Service Management (BSM), showing you a way to attain BSM value according to your organization’s primary pain points. Trying to tackle all of these IT goals at once was overwhelming, to both our sales force and our customers. IT folks were asking, “Good grief, where do I start? I have this set of problems to solve, show me how. I can’t even think about implementing BSM until I get some of these other annoying recurring problems out of the way.”
Whether your organization is chaotic, reactive, or proactive, you can find value along the route, no matter what path you choose first. You can enter any route you want, focusing on the problems that plague your IT group the most.
This discovery along any route to value is what I’m calling an “Ah ha” use, similar to Real Simple magazine’s column on the same. Got only a sock to spare on board with you on a flight to the moon? As seen on the movie Apollo 13, one of the items they used to adapt their square filter into the round receptacle is a sock.
Here’s an example of an Ah ha use from BMC’s IT department. They needed to bring several databases into compliance for Sarbanes-Oxley audits. They are using BMC SQL-BackTrack for Oracle and BMC SQL-BackTrack for Microsoft SQL Server, but they found they could use BMC Remedy Asset Management to actually go out and look for the data sources that needed backing up. Ah ha! While database backup and recovery is along the Infrastructure and Application Management Route to Value, they discovered that an Asset Mangement and Discovery Route to Value helped them on their journey to their goal.
What “Ah ha” uses have you found for your software tools lately?
