CMDBs: Above and Beyond

1
CMDBs Above and Beyond

• Sarah Nadi
• CS 446 Nov. 26th, 2009

2
Overview

• This work is in collaboration with CA Labs
  Canada.
• This is part of the work done in the Software
  Architecture Group (SWAG).

3
Outline

• Importance of proper IT management.
• What is a Configuration Management Database
  (CMDB)?
• Use cases of a CMDB.
• What are root cause analysis and change impact
  analysis?
• Example work done on root cause analysis and
  change impact analysis.

4
Enterprise IT Management

• Information Technology (IT) systems are the basis
  of most business services today.
• When something goes wrong with an IT system,
  companies face financial losses.
• Therefore, Enterprise IT Management (EITM) has
  been lately gaining a lot of interest.
• Reactively, IT analysts should be able to quickly
  locate the underlying cause of a problem (Root
  Cause Analysis).
• Proactively, IT analysts should be able to
  identify the impacts of changes to the system to
  prevent unforeseen problems (Change Impact
  Analysis).

5
Configuration Management Database

• A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) stores
  the information about the different components of
  an IT system. It contains details about the
  attributes and history of each Configuration Item
  (CI), details of the relationships between CIs,
  their problem and change history.
• A configuration item (CI) is any component of an
  IT infrastructure. It can be software, hardware,
  services etc.
• Usually, business critical components are
  included as CIs in the CMDB.
• The information in a CMDB provides a basis for
  root cause analysis and change impact analysis.

6
Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) (The
big picture)
Calls
Service Z
Uses
X
Service Y
Service X
Forwards
Provides
IT System
IT Analyst
7
CMDB
Has
Provides More Details
Information
8
Configuration Items (CIs)
CMDB Relationships
9
Knowledge contained in a CMDB

• Hardware, networks, locations, etc.
• Software, SLA, versioning information.
• Reporting structures, contacts, organization.
• Dependencies between components.
• Incident and Problem reports.
• History of changes made, by who, when, why, etc.
• Gateway to logs and diagnostics.

10
Seven use cases of a CMDB 1

• What can the data in a CMDB be used for?
• Change Impact Analysis.
• Change Governance.
• Root Cause Analysis.
• Auditing and Compliance.
• Resource Optimization.
• Services Mapping.
• Services Performance Planning.

11
Root Cause Analysis
?
X
Analyst
?
?
?
X
?
?
X
?
X
?
12
Root Cause Analysis

• A fault is a design flaw or malfunction that
  causes a failure of one or more CIs or IT
  services.
• A failure is the loss of ability to operate to
  specification, or to deliver the required output.
  
• An incident is an observed event that is not part
  of the standard operation of a service and that
  causes, or may cause, an interruption to, or a
  reduction in, the quality of that service.
• Root cause analysis tries to map an incident to
  its underlying fault.

13
Change Impact Analysis
?
?

• What if analysis.
• Find impact of a
• proposed change.

?
Upgrade Oracle 10g to Oracle 11g
?
14
Change Impact Analysis

• A change set is the set of CIs that need to be
  changed for a change to be correctly implemented
  with no side effects.
• Unplanned changes can cause unexpected problems
  in related CIs ? Identifying the correct change
  set is very important.
• Accurate change impact analysis proactively
  prevents future incidents.

15
Importance of root cause analysis change impact
analysis

• Reactively, IT analysts should be able to quickly
  locate the underlying cause of a problem (root
  cause analysis).
• Proactively, IT analysts should be able to
  identify the impacts of changes to the system to
  prevent unforeseen problems (change impact
  analysis).
• Root cause analysis and change impact analysis
  are, therefore, important IT management
  activities that prevent costly IT outages.

16
Challenges

• Identifying the information needed to perform
  root cause analysis and change impact analysis.
• Finding the best way to model this information.
• Providing practical and useful solutions.

17
Our Proposed Solution DRACA

• A Decision Support framework for Root Cause
  Analysis and Change Impact Analysis.
• Given the CI involved in an incident, DRACA
  provides a list of ranked CIs who are suspect
  root causes (root cause analysis).
• Given an initial CI to change, DRACA provides a
  list of ranked CIs who should be changed as well
  (change impact analysis).

18
Root Cause Analysis
19
Info. needed for root cause analysis

• Existing dependencies in the CMDB.
• Previous incident reports, problem reports, and
  change reports.
• Calendar information.
• CI Change Times.

20
DRACAs Root Causes Analysis Process
21
(No Transcript)
22
Root cause matrix

• Rij is the probability that i is the root cause
  of the incident in j

23
Change Impact Analysis
24
Info. needed for change impact analysis

• Historical change sets
• CIs that have changed simultaneously in the past
  are likely to change again together in the
  future.
• Understanding previous change sets can help
  identify future ones.

25
DRACAS Change Impact Analysis Process
26
The DRACA Prototype Tool
27
Empirical Work

• Tested our technique on industrial data from CAs
  Global Information Systems (GIS) team that manage
  CAs internal network and services.
• We used 3 years worth of data to test our
  prediction model.
• Our results were promising and we were able to
  correctly predict a large percentage of the
  change sets.

28
Summary

• Proper IT management is very important to
  minimize IT systems disruptions.
• A CMDB supports IT management by tracking
  business critical CIs.
• Root cause analysis and change impact analysis
  are two important process in IT management.
• Root cause analysis involves finding the original
  cause of a problem.
• Change impact analysis involves finding the set
  of CIs that might be affected by a proposed
  change.

29
Questions/Comments ?
30
References

• 1 Messineo, David A Ryder, Macolm. Why
  Implement a Configuration Management Database
  (CMDB)? Seven Fundamental Use Cases. CA White
  Paper, 2008.