The Configuration Management Database or CMDB lies at the heart of ITIL. It is a complete asset list of all of the ACM Configuration Items under management. The CMDB is refreshed every 12 hours, meaning that Configuration Items (CI) can be added, removed or relocated and the CMDB will automatically update to reflect this.
The CMDB has been designed to discover how the various CI are configured to interact together, and therefore understands the dependencies between applications.
This inherent and always up-to-date understanding of the environment is used in other ITIL disciplines such as:
- Service Desk, enabling Dashboards to measure and apply the correct thresholds to the integration between CI
- Availability Manager so that data around mission-critical components is monitored
- Capacity Manager, triggering consumption reports to be run against the CI
- Release Manager where the current and recommended release of CI is displayed
- Continuity Manager constructs a list of CI so that spares inventories are complete
