Over time, the Configuration Management Database, CMDB has gotten a bad reputation because it is usually never accurate, lacks full-stack coverage, and manual attempts to maintain it fail given the rapid nature of change in today's IT environments. The challenges presented by an incomplete, inaccurate CMDB are infinite. How do you confidently or safely complete a change request if you can't evaluate the impact of making that change? How can you efficiently determine the root cause of an issue if you don't have visibility into how assets are connected in your environment? To mention a few. Now, thanks to Tanium, organizations can have an updated CMDB. Keep reading to see how.
Holistic Visibility
Organizations that initiate CMDB at the core of their IT operations aim to have complete view and control of their endpoints environment and keep track of all software, hardware, network devices and the relationships between them. In other words, they seek to have a firm grip on their assets management. However, keeping a clean CMDB can be challenging in today's IT environments. The sources that feed the CMDB – such as traditional network discovery, monitoring and endpoint protection tools – are varied and updated at separate times, leading to inaccurate and out-of-date information getting into the CMDB. Because one of the basic features of Tanium is full visibility into a computing ecosystem, it can enrich the CMDB with real-time and correct information about assets. With accurate data, organizations are empowered to make well-informed decisions.
Continual Asset Monitoring
Tanium comprises discovery and inventory tools that function as effective asset finders. While most current solutions fail to uncover all and adequately identify all assets available in an environment, Tanium prides itself in finding hidden assets that organizations are unaware of. It achieves this by performing distributed scanning to continuously monitor an endpoint environment with minimal network strain or reconfiguration of searches, thereby providing a current, accurate inventory of hardware and software assets across the environment, empowering other Tanium workflows or enriching and updating existing data stores such as a CMDB.
Visualizes Asset Interdependencies
One of the prominent reasons companies use CMDBs is to understand the relationship and interdependencies among assets. However, a CMDB is only as good as its sources. If it's sourced feed is inaccurate or outdated, it might be unable to manage change deployment, which could lead to service downtime and cost the company greatly. Thankfully Tanium provides a full and precise view of assets interactions and can feed this data to a CMDB thereby empowering the system to understand these relationships, predict which users, systems, software, and configuration items could be affected by an upcoming change and reduce the risk of business disruption.
Conclusion
CMDB is the cornerstone of a successful ITSM implementation and therefore, crucial to the success and growth of any organization. With the Tanium software solution, the daily obstacles businesses face due to out-of-date CMDB can be replaced with possibilities. This platform ensures that an organization can use the CMDB to keep track of all assets and configuration items, including all hardware and software by providing a full picture of IT environments and consistent aggregation of asset data.
