Configuration Items

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Introduction Configuration Manager is a repository / data warehouse for information technology (IT) installations (CMDB). It holds data relating to a collection of IT entities (commonly referred to as configuration items (CI)), as well as descriptive relationships between such entities. A Configuration Item may be: A physical entity, such as an Asset (Server, Switch etc), a User, Request or Document A logical entity such as an Asset (instance of a database) Conceptual, such as a Service Regardless of the Configuration Item type it is important to understand and manage their attributes and understand the relationships and dependancies between them. For Example if a database instance get's corrupted, this may affect the ERP service and prevent orders from being processed and directly affect the efficiency and productiveness of a businesses employees.

Related Articles Configuration Items List Configuration Item Explorer Administration Service Assets

Features

Configuration Manager allows you to view relationships between Configuration Items via it's graphical Configuration Item Explorer. Configuration Items which can be viewed, and the relationships between them include:

• Assets
• Services
• Requests
• Users
• Documents

You can launch the Explorer from the following Configuration Item views:

• Configuration Manager List
• Asset records
• Service records
• Request records

In Policy Configuration Items

Certain Configuration Item types can be marked as In Policy, this provides you with the ability to Manage the Configuration Item's which are most important to you, and in some cases enhances and enables additional functionality against the original entity.

• You may wish to manage Server's and understand which Services are dependant on them, this would be an example of why you would want to put those Configuration Item's In Policy
• You may want to schedule routine maintenance against business critical infrastructure, and such enable Activities to manage this work, this would be a reason to put these Configuration Item's in Policy
• You may have several thousand computer peripherals such as Mice which are low value and hold no business value in terms dependancies or relationships to other Configurations Items, these may add no value being In Policy