Configuration Management Overview

A Configuration Item (CI) is any component, hardware, firmware, software, or virtual, that is managed in order to help deliver a service. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is the store of these CI records. A CI can be a laptop, a server, a network switch, an installed application, a software distribution package, or a software license certificate. If it is managed so that a service keeps running, it is registered as a CI.

Why it matters

An IT organization can only manage what it can see. Without a CMDB, the relationship between a business service and the hardware and software underneath it lives in people's heads and in spreadsheets, so when something breaks, a contract comes up for renewal, or a cost has to be allocated, the answer has to be reconstructed from scratch.

Xurrent's CMDB makes that relationship a first-class record. Because every CI is linked to the service it supports, a single CI answers several questions at once: which service is affected if this box fails, who supports it, where it sits, what it cost, when its warranty expires, and which requests and problems have touched it. That linkage is what lets an incident on a piece of infrastructure automatically implicate the service that depends on it, and what lets software and hardware costs roll up to the services they enable.

The CI record is the asset

Xurrent does not have a separate Asset record. The CI record is the asset. The same record captures the operational and technical CMDB attributes and the financial and asset attributes, the latter in a Financial Details section. Xurrent packages the two together as a single capability, Service Configuration and IT Asset Management.

Related

The full CI field list and the complete set of Status values live on the Configuration Item reference page.