CMDB Federation

Van Wiles reports that CMDBf members were able to do some sort of data import/export.

“Effectively all participants were able to connect to each other’s web services and pull (or push) meaningful data to the other participants’ web services using a defined set of interfaces.”

My bet is they exercised a “shim” API or wrapper in front of the BMC Atrium CMDB and IBM Tivoli CCMDB to do simple imports/exports of some high level data. The real meat and potatoes will be how well the data models line up between each vendor and just what can be mapped, exported/imported between CMDB’s and what can not.

What we need is a full vendor common data model mashup so we can easily see what everyone’s doing, what they each call “things” and where the gaps are. Are vendors publishing their data models? It’d be a good project for some Web2.0 systems management or ITIL practitioner to throw together something like this. Then this could be extended to include the types of information about “things” in all of the network, system, application and service management and monitoring tools out there. So Billy the practitioner wants to know everything about this really important business service or application, the mashup maker would allow them to see their “federated CMDB” information all the way out to their management and monitoring tools, historical monitoring information, events, outages, perf/avail/capacity information, etc. One “federated” service oriented view that cuts through all of the IT silos to enable someone to make the right decisions at the right time.

Add some comments here if you find links to these.

• IBM Tivoli CCMDB Common Data Model
• BMC Atrium Common Data Model
• HP Common Data Model
• CA Common Data Model
• Fujitsu Common Data Model
• Microsoft Common Data Model

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