Blade Watch

Over the last few months and since I’ve began writing this blog, one of the key things that has always been on my mind and that of the end user community is inventory. Inventory is key, knowing what you have, who owns it, and what it is underpins everything, your support matrix, your decision making process – what can be virtualized, what’s an operational risk and what isn’t etc.

With this in mind, with discussion with many teams and individuals at different levels I requested a bladewatch CMDB be written, an inventory tool a tool that can be used in partnership with whatever in house or bought in systems you have to aid in the management of your infrastructure – something that becomes ever more crucial as the infrastructure gets more complex.

From feedback from end users in the CMDB management/reporting space were:

• Too many systems that didn’t talk to each other – there were always just a few systems that we couldn’t talk too
• Support documentation was in a separate location to the server – so at 3am when server Manchester18 goes down, the engineer might spend 35 minutes looking for an 80 page support document in our SharePoint site when he only needs to know if he can reboot it as it’s out of memory – making a simple support call an issue that got escalated unnecessarily
• The high entry cost of a CMDB, they all seem to include a ‘consultancy fee; a development and set up fee and even worse sometimes a per server or per data center site – oh you’ve got virtual machines, you’ll need our virtual plug in, our different user view plug in.
• The proprietary design – “that adding a field could require a re-design or weeks of development time”
• Ownership issues – “you can’t add an application field, we own the code..”

With this in mind we asked some CEO’s/CIO’s and CFO’s what their core requirements were from a CMDB. We outlined what was possible at a fixed cost, what functionality was crucial, what was a nice to have, and most importantly what we actually needed. I’ve paraphrased them:

• How many servers do we have – How many are virtual/physical
• How many are in data center in Swansea (our BCP site) What ratio of servers in the data center in Swansea are production and who owns the most
• Can we have a list of applications and servers with their application or business contacts
• Can we have a per application view of the data center, the server estate etc
• Centralization of the data – a gold source which everyone agrees on

Oh I can get the information, that’s not an issue, but it’s having it in a format that is reportable, that does not require the world’s most complicated vlookup with access to the 8 different monitoring and inventory tools that I might have. The crucial concept being that accuracy to the nth degree is not as important as having an overall system view for noting changes to individual systems, for reporting where we are with our IT, for giving a per application, business line or even IT team view – a networks view, a Windows server or trading system view, with the right level of access to protect our data as required.

With this in mind I’ve had a developer working on a CMDB. Naturally what I view as a CMDB will of course differ from what others may think, and in the typical enterprise there may be an industrial strength solution which crosses all networks, which inventories everything automatically on Tuesdays at 3:17am. But for everyone else, who needs a tool that allows me to, keep an inventory, manage our server estate and add value to the support function, we have the bladewatch cmdb.

I’ve seen the first draft and frankly it rocks, I’ve requested some detailed changes once they’re done, within the next few weeks, we’ll be making it live and launching an online demo, I’ve yet to get the development bill for all the code, but regardless the viewpoint was always to develop a mixed business and IT tool, to reduce the barriers to support in terms of inventory and in empowering your technical teams to have one central repository for notes about systems and applications. More soon. If you have any questions do email me.

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