Planning to use federated data

Federated data is data stored outside BMC CMDB but linked to configuration items (CIs), so that it is accessible through BMC CMDB.

Types of federated data
These are the most common types of federated data are:

• Related information or information about a CI that does not itself qualify as a CI and therefore should not be stored in a CMDB.
• Detailed attributes are attributes of CIs stored in BMC CMDB, but they are attributes that are not important enough to track at the level of a CMDB.

A few examples of information that can be federated are invoices, purchase orders, and printer maintenance records.

Benefits of creating federated data
These are the benefits of federating non-essential data outside the CMDB:

• CMDB is easier to manage when it has only the essential data.
• CMDB is more efficient and has better performance.

In BMC CMDB, not only can you view federated data but you can also retrieve that data for use by a consuming application as if it were part of BMC CMDB. This feature enables you to access outside data from the central CMDB repository by using your existing data store infrastructure.

The following figure illustrates both types of federation data for a BMC_ComputerSystem instance named Computer A. The instance can be linked to incident records about Computer A, which is related information, and also linked to the discovered attributes of Computer A that were not imported into BMC CMDB.

 Federated data

By using the Federation Manager plug-ins, you can connect the master BMC CMDB to external sources of data and federate data from different types of repositories. The following figure illustrates the concept of federation between BMC CMDB and a federated Oracle database.

Federation between BMC CMDB and federated database