Part 1: Step by Step guide to CMDB Integration with ARIS BA

If you are interested not only to pull information about CIs from CMDB but also like to keep it in sync with CMDB then this article is for you.

Out-of-box ARIS does not provide any sort of integration with any CMDB such as CA Service Desk, BMC etc. But you can easily integrate ARIS BA to any CMDB database.

There is no software requirement to perform this integration, apart from “Having access to CMDB through a custom SQL view” and “must have installed Microsoft Access 2007”. Most of CMDB vendors follow vendor neutral schema whether it’s from HP, CA or BMC. But you can ask your CMDB DB Manager to create a custom view containing CIs objects that you are interested in. For e.g. You may be interested in Server information but not so enthusiastic about VPN-Link or UPS Power supply for that matter. For the sake of simplicity we will call CIs objects as Resource, it could be a server, software, business service, business application and each resource is affiliated with different set of attributes. For instance IP Address is relevant for Servers/Routers/Switches but not so important rather in-fact not required for Business Application, Business Services.

What type of Integration are we talking about?

Here, we defined Integration in following ways:

• Retrieving relevant resource objects along with attributes from  CMDB such as Servers, Softwares, Services etc.
• Update their attributes with respect to CMDB i.e. developing a synchronization mechanism for attributes
• Marking objects that are deleted from CMDB
• Building relationship among retrieved CMDB Objects i.e. relationship among CIs.

What I can do with ARIS?

ITIL is all about operations and management. But we are not interested in tickets, incidents, problems instances which are there on CMDB.

We want to link our Business Processes , Strategic Initiatives, Business Services, IT Systems to IT Infrastructure that is there in CMDB. It will provide an aid to build a more realistic link between Business and IT.

The one type of integration that is common is to export Resource List from CMDB and Import as an excel sheet in ARIS. This kind of integration is really hard to manage and almost impossible to be a part of any agile organization where change frequency is really high.

Conceptual Diagram of Integration:

Before, we move to ARIS integration, you need to prepare MS Access 2007 and split Z_RESOURCE_VIEW and Z_RELATIONSHIP_VIEW into four tables as shown in the above picture (more on this later).

First you need to understand the following concepts:

What is meant by Family/Class in CMDB?

Well, it’s a way to organize the information, each resource will belong to a family/class.

Family is a superset which consists of classes. For instance your CMDB may be configured to have following class and families

Hardware Family

• Server
• Router
• Switches
• Firewall

…

Software Family

• Database
• Software Utilities
• System Software

Service Family

• Business Service
• Technical Service

The above info is a organizational contextual information. But the idea is same. Do you see why it’s important for us to recognize the different families BECAUSE WE WILL MAP OUR ARIS OBJECTS/SYMBOLS TO THEM.

Un-Normalized Database:

Secondly, each Resource has a set of attributes attached to it. For eg. Resource belonging to <Business Service> Class may have attribute customers, users etc. But for resources belonging to Server family, it's more pertinent to have IP Address, Location Info (Building#/Floor#/Room#/Cabinet#/).

Instead of having separate tables for Server Class, Service Class resources we will sacrifice the concept of Database Normalization and insert the redundant attributes within SQL View. Bottom line is that, you may have empty attributes for resources but we will take care of it in the script part.

You can probably guess, WE WILL ALSO MAP RESOURCE ATTRIBUTES TO ARIS ATTRIBUTES. Keep this in mind for some attributes you may have a feeling that they might be actually separate object but for keep things simple, we will consider resource and attributes that are defined in CMDB.

…continued….