Beetil

What servers do you have? What licenses do you have? What will be affected if you take this router out of service? Who uses this application? Where is it hosted? What’s causing me the most trouble?

These are all questions that configuration management is supposed to answer. It’s all about “providing a logical model of the infrastructure or a service” and maintaining control over these items through effective incident, problem, change and release management.

Configuration management is a complex subject, and one of the hardest ITIL processes to implement.

What do you want to control?

First up ask yourself the question – what items (we call these things configuration items, or CIs for short) do you want to control? Does it really add value to control these? Can you control these? I’ve seen organisations track every mouse, keyboard, CPU, etc…. Does this really add value? I suspect not. Ask yourself if it is important to the business. My biggest piece of advice – start off with the big ticket items (i.e. services, servers, data centres, routers). You can always add more detail later.

Don’t just think about technology related stuff here. Think about people, locations, services, documentation as well as hardware and software.

Build up the relationships

Next up, ask yourself how these items (CIs) are related to each other i.e. service XYZ depends upon server ABC, which is located in data centre 123. Don’t ever underestimate the effort involved in managing and maintaining these. You can buy tools to help you detect IT assets, and you can buy even more expensive tools to help you see how they are interconnected, but at the end of the day – someone needs to know how this relates to people and services, and someone needs to manage and maintain this stuff. You can collect it. But can you manage it?

Hence start off with a high level view as opposed to going for the detailed jugular!

Manage your configuration items using incident, problem, change and release management.

OK, so you’ve now got a lovely interconnected database of people, servers, locations, but you’ve got to keep it current. There’s these wonderful processes called incident, problem, change and release management. Yes! – we use these to manage our configuration items. And so the ITIL strands come together.

With a fully up to date CMDB (configuration management database) or CMS (Configuration Management System), as it’s called in ITIL v3, there’s all sorts of goodies you should be able to do. Let’s take a server for example. Amongst other things, you should be able to:

• find out its MAC address
• find out its warranty details
• find out where it is hosted
• find out what it hosts
• find out what you’ll break if you take it out of service
• find out how many incidents are related to this server
• find out how often this server changes

As I mentioned before, configuration management is a hard process to get right, but Beetil aims to make it as easy as possible. So let’s take a look at how Beetil does configuration management.

How to Access Config Management in Beetil

All Beetil users have access to Config Items via any incident, problem, change or release. On any one of these screens in the right hand column users can search for and link to affected CI’s for that incident, problem etc.

To give users greater access to Config Management administrators will need give permission on a per user basis. Go to Admin > Beetil Users and click on a user you want to give config permissions to. On the user screen click edit (edit link at the bottom of the screen). Underneath the service matrix there are the user’s ‘Beetil Account Rights’ options. There are two levels of config permission rights to choose from – Config Management User and Config Management Administrator. Both types have the ability to add, edit and delete CI’s but only Config Management Administrators can manage CI categories and relationship types.

The Dashboard

In the top right hand menu from anywhere in Beetil, permissioned users will see the config link. This will take you to a configuration management dashboard.

This shows a category hierarchy, along with a list of recently updated configuration items.

You can navigate the hierarchy, create sub categories, and even change the desired CI attributes for each category. If you create subcategories, then any CI will automatically inherit it’s parent attributes. When browsing the configuration items, simply use the right hand panel to manage the categories and attributes.

You can also see for each configuration item the number of related incidents, problems, changes and releases.

The Configuration Item View

When you click on a configuration item, or click to create a new configuration item you will get taken to the CI view.

Here’s where we can edit the attributes of a CI, create its relationships, and see its related incidents, problems, changes and releases.

You can even add yourself to a CI’s watchlist and get email notifications if any of it’s attributes or relationships change.

You’ll notice that the right hand panel in the CI view also shows you the number of related incidents, problems, changes and releases, as well as a full history of the configuration item.

Understanding and Creating CI Relationships

Once you’ve created all of your assets you can easily create linkages between them. I’ve mocked up an example from a favourite film of mine. You’ll work it out!!

The Imperial Force is building its new secret weapon, the Death Star, and is about to bring its new service, the Defence Shield online. Let’s say that for the Defence Shield (a service) to successfully operate, we need to install ForceSoftware’s DefenceShieldPro onto to server THX1100. Let’s also assume for this case that Grand Moff Tarkin is a user of this service.

Let’s first go to the Defence Shield service. It’s pretty blank in there at the moment.

Let’s add the software and the user relationships.

In the relationships section select needs from the drop down list, then type “force” in the adjacent field. The list will automatically filter by ‘force’. Select the ForceSoft DefencePro software. Your relationship has been created. This is a hard relationship in this regard because in the event of the software being unavailable, the service will become unavailable. A needs B.

When we add the user relationship you’ll see that there are two sets of “is a user of / is used by”:

• is a user of (hard) / is used by (soft) - This will create a relationship that is hard one way, and soft the other. In this case if we chose “is used by (soft)” then this would mean that if you took this service out of action, Grand Moff Tarkin would also “become unavailable”.
• is a user of (soft) / is used by (soft) – This will create a relationship that is soft both ways. In this case if we chose “is used by (soft)” then this would mean that if you took this service out of action, Grand Moff Tarkin would remain unaffected.

It depends how you wish to set up your relationships, but for this example let’s assume that Grand Moff Tarkin wouldn’t be aversely affected if this service goes down. Darth Vader might think differently!!

After saving we see this view:

We now need to bring the server into the equation. We could create a “dependent upon” relationship upon the THX1100 server, but more accurately, we can say that the DefencePro software is installed on this server. Navigate to the DefencePro software Item to add the relationship to the server. First thing you will notice is the reverse relationship we created to the DefenceShield service. Let’s add the relationship:

This is a hard relationship in the respect that if we take out the server THX1100, then this will affect the software.

So let’s go and take a look at the Death Star’s primary data centre. There’s been a few more things configured, but at a glance you can easily see what would be affected if this data centre was out of action (Beetil does this by traversing all of it’s hard relationships). So you’d imagine Darth Vadar wouldn’t be happy if an outage to the data centre occurred at the same time as he wanted the tractor beam to haul in the Millenium Falcon. Grand Moff Tarkin lives another day! How many times have you been in his shoes where you’re put on the spot and you need to let people know what would be affected if you take a server, or component, out for service.

At any time you can also see a map view of the configuration items relationships. Handy.

Linking Configuration Items to Incidents, Problems, Changes and Releases

So we’ve now built up a big list of CIs that we wish to manage and we’ve created relationships between them. Time to add more context…

When you are in an incident, problem, change or release, you can easily assign affected configuration items via the right hand panel.

Click the + button to add a config item linkage, and simply search for the affected item, or items.

When you go back to the configuration management screens you can then see which CIs are causing you the most pain, what’s the most problematic, what’s the most changeable etc.

Beetil and Configuration Management Roles

Beetil account adminstrators have the ability to permission configuration management at multiple levels per user:

• All Beetil users have the ability to search for configuration items, and to link them to incidents, problems, changes and releases.
• Configuration users have the ability to add, edit and delete configuration items and their relationships.
• Configuration managers have all the abilities of a configuration user, but are also allowed to manage CI categories, the attributes, and relationship types.

This might all sound very daunting, but once you get your culture in place to manage configuration items properly, and create those linkages, it begins to add a tremendous amount of value to your business. But just remember, please don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. Start small, and work upwards.

May the force be with you.

More links in our getting started with Beetil series

• Setting up and configuring services
• Incident Management
• Beetil and the Customer Portal
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Release Management (coming soon)

Remember you can always access the help link in the top right hand corner of most pages! And you can always contact us on email at support@beetil.com, or catch us around the Campfire.

Tags: CMDB, configuration management, impact analysis, itil

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Configuration Management, Getting Started, Hints and Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.