What's in CMDB Solution 7.0

If a customer is tracking assets, without currently tracking the costs associated to those assets, CMDB Solution 7.0 may be all they need at the current time. This would be whether or not they are using just the resource types that are shipped with the product or their own custom types. If however, they are tracking costs or are tracking software licenses, they need to wait for Asset Management Solution 7 before migrating.

Many people are not certain what exactly is in CMDB Solution version 7. This document will first discuss the features of CMDB Solution 7 that are the basics of the solution. These features have been migrated from version 6.5 with a fresh look and the similar functionality as is in version CMDB 6.5. In the second section an explanation will be given on the improvements that have been made to the product by virtue of being moved to the new Notification Server 7.0 platform. The last section will discuss improvements made to specific CMDB Solution features.

Version 6.5 Features Ported to 7.0

1. Configuration Items – The product ships with 20 pre-defined resource types (also called configuration items (CI) or assets) which have attributes and associations already defined. Some examples are computer, monitor, network printer, cell phone, rack, service, system, and UPS. An example of an association is owner. There is also a generic resource type called an asset which has attributes like name, manufacturer and model, serial number as well as relationships like owner and location.

   

2. Relationships/Associations – Knowing who the owner of an asset is as well as where it is located are two very basic and important relationships or associations. In other words a user or location is associated to an asset to represent the relationship between the two. The reverse relationship would be all assets owned by a user or all assets at a particular location.
3. Enter data – In order to enter data about assets a user of the system can use the edit page to manually enter data. The edit page has been improved and is covered in more detail in the next section outlining new functionality of the CMDB Solution 7. Another method for entering data is through the data connector, formerly called the Connector Solution. The functionality of the data connector is now been included in the platform (Notification Server) and does not need to be managed as a separate solution.
4. Extendable resource model – If the resource types that ship with the product are not sufficient or there are additional attributes that an organization needs to track on pre-defined resource types, the product provides the ability to add custom resource type, attribute sets (called data classes) and/or resource relationships.
5. Organization Types – Organizational types are also configuration items. What makes them distinct is that they can be associated to another resource of the same type. For example a user can be associated to another user who would be their manager. Another example would be the hierarchy of Location. A company may have multiple locations in different cities which can be further broken down to specific buildings, then floors, etc. Other pre-define organizational types are Cost Centers and Departments.
6. Change decision support – An important use of a CMDB is to analyze impact of a proposed change. In version 6.5 of the CMDB Solution there is a link between the Altiris Helpdesk and the items in the CMDB. In version 7 the same type of connectivity is provided from the Altiris ServiceDesk.
7. Graphical display of association – Building further on the concept of associations is the ability to graphically display relationships related to assets. The feature is called the Resource Association Diagram and can be accessed either by right-clicking on an asset or from the Resource Manager which can also be accessed by right-clicking on an asset or directly going to the URL for the Resource Manager.

   

One final note about CMDB Solution functionality (both version 6.5 and 7.0). One of the resource types that ships with CMDB Solution is a generic Contract type. Custom contract types can be created by using the generic contract resource type as the Base resource type. Caution should be taken in creating custom resource types that have the same name as those that are later created by Asset Management Solution once it is installed. Thorough tests have not been done yet when installing Asset Management 7 with the same named resource types created with CMDB Solution 7. If they are given different names, the data connector can be used after Asset Management Solution is installed to migrate the data.

New or Improved Features of Platform

This section will point out improvements to the CMDB Solution due to the changes made in the Notification Server 7 platform.

1. UI/portals – The console is divided into the following four areas:

• Menu Bar: Provides menus to perform management activities on NS and installed solutions and a search bar to search for items such as computers, users, and reports Each menu bar item will be described in greater detail later in this lesson.
• Breadcrumb bar: Displays the path used to navigate to your current location
• Left pane: Provides a tree view of items which can be selected and expanded The content pane displays pages based on tree selections. CMDB still heavily relies on the tree view. In order to create a new asset, one right-clicks on the resource type, for example, monitor and selects the option to Create <resource type>.
• Right pane: Displays content, depending on what is selected in the left pane The Symantec Management Console differs from the previous NS 6 versions in how resources are organized, managed, and secured.
• You can customize a number of console elements:
  • Portal pages
  • Web parts
  • Views
  • Menus and submenus
  • Context menus (right-click menus)
  • The Symantec Management Console includes predefined elements, such as menus and portal pages, that are organized in a way to help you quickly and easily access Notification Server and installed solutions. As different solutions are installed, they add items to the default structure. The management console is extremely flexible. You can redesign the default layout to best meet the needs of your organization. You can
  • Show or hide menu items
  • Add menu items and submenus
  • Create or edit portal pages – Portal pages display a collection of different pieces of information contained in Web parts. Web parts are the building blocks for portal pages. A Web part can display a report or the contents of a Web page. The management console is supplied with a set of predefined Web parts that you can use to build your portal pages. You can modify these Web parts and create new ones. Notification Server includes predefined portal pages, and solutions can also add predefined portal pages. You can also create and customize your own portal pages. By customizing console pages, users can adapt the interface to their job functions.
  • Modify and create views Based on the security role a user is assigned to, you can show or hide menu items depending on their job function. For example, you may want to give a user access to the Reports menu but not the Manage menu. You can also add new menus. You can also customize the sub-menus that are displayed under menus.

2. Scoped security through Organizational Views – Organizational Views (OV) are part of the new NS 7 resource security model. Resources in the CMDB now obtain all of their permissions from the organizational group and views to which they belong. An Organizational View is a self-contained hierarchy of organizational groups, which contain resources. OVs are security structures that administrators use to manage their IT environment. They are meant to simplify administration of the Symantec Management platform, so their structure should reflect how you administer the Notification Server. For example, if you as an NS administrator are responsible for a geographical regions or regions, you should organize your OVs along geographical lines: World —>Americas—>North America—>Regions—>Region West—>Utah—>Lindon. If you manage along functional lines, organize resources by function. NS 7 allows multiple organizational views because administrators may have multiple ways of organizing resources. So you could have both a view by function and by region.

3. Reporting – new reporting engine.

Improvements to CMDB Solution Functionality

1. Resource edit page – The edit page can be used to view and edit all resource types, whether or not they were predefined or custom. In version 7 of CMDB Solution there are no longer tabs and fields are displayed in alphabet order by the name of the data class that they are in or the name of the association. For example the data class Manufacturer contains the fields Manufacturer and Model and would follow the association Location since M follows L alphabetically.

   The edit page in version 7 of CMDB now has the ability to be customized and saved as views. In edit page views administrators and users can define the order they would prefer to display the data classes and associations. They can also choose to hide data classes and/or associations as well. The Altiris Administrator, CMDB Manager, or any other security role that is given the right can designate a view to be available to all users. It is then marked as (Global).

   

2. Resource association diagram – From the Resource Association Diagram, you can select an associated resource to see the resources that are associated with it. The Resource Association Diagram has the following two filters:
      • Association Type Filter – lets you choose which association types you want to see displayed in the Resource Association Diagram.
      • The Resource Type Filter – lets you choose which resource types you want to see.
   There are also options to determine how many levels and how many nodes at each level you want to display. There are three different formats; tree hierarchy, free format or static format. Nodes can be clicked and dragged to change the way the spacing between nodes on the diagram are viewed. The display options and filter definition can be saved and can be collapsed to provide more room to display the resource nodes and the association labels.
3. Automatic organizational views– As described above, organizational views are used to set security. When CMDB Solution 7 is installed and associations are made between assets and locations, cost centers or users to users, organizational views are automatically created with the same hierarchy and membership.

   

4. Create custom hierarchical – The organizational types that ship with the product are Location, Cost Center, Department. A company may however need custom organizational types, for example Business Units. The steps for creating a custom organizational type start the same as creating a custom resource type with its attributes/data classes. The one extra step is to setup an association from the new resource type to itself which is allowed by clicking the option on the resource association definition page titled “Use as Hierarchy Association”.

   

CMDB Solution 7 has more features than most people are aware. Twenty predefined resource types, the ability to extend those resource types and add new ones as well as enhancements to the edit page and Resource Association Diagram. That is all on top of the new features of the Management Platform (Notification Server) 7.