This documentation supports the 20.08 version of BMC CMDB, which is available only to BMC Helix subscribers (SaaS).

To view an earlier version, select the version from the Product version menu.

Drift management to track changes in the CMDB

Important

Drift Management has been deprecated from BMC CMDB. The documentation provided for Drift Management is also deprecated and provided for information only.

See Deprecated features.

This use case describes the ways in which you can track changes in your CMDB. To perform auditing, verification, and management of infrastructure changes in your IT environment, you must first know the difference between the current physical state of your IT environment and the expected or correct state of your environment. Drift management helps you keep your data center operationally compliant with the business rules of your IT environment. 

Drift management scenario

Scenario

The following example show you when you may want to perform a drift analysis for your IT environment.

Suppose you are a BMC CMDB administrator at the fictional company Calbro Services and you want to create a report of the changes the IT environment has undergone within a time period. You may have to perform the following comparisons to know the changes that occurred in the IT environment:

  •  Comparison of the current state of BMC CMDB with a snapshot
    You want to determine whether drift has occurred over a period of time. You make a snapshot of BMC CMDB at a given point in time (this becomes your baseline) and later (a day, a week, or a month, for example) compare the current state (your target) with the baseline. 

  • Comparison with a standard (for compliance)
    You compare the state of BMC CMDB with a baseline to ensure that the physical state is not drifting from the declared standard.
    This scenario is commonly called the golden server or golden CI. Within BMC CMDB, you have the CIs for a crucial business service (for example, security) configured exactly as needed. The golden CIs are the baseline with which the other security servers (targets) are compared to verify that they are configured to match the declared standard (the baseline). 
    A golden CI is configured exactly as needed and is used as a basis of comparison with your target CIs.
  • Comparison between a test dataset and BMC CMDB
    You want to define a test or sandbox dataset on top of another dataset to determine the impact of potential modifications in the test dataset on BMC CMDB. In this scenario, BMC CMDB is the baseline and the test dataset is the target. The comparison uses the BMC CMDB API to view the equivalent of a merge between the two datasets.


Drift management workflow

The following workflow describes the general steps of drift management:

  1. A snapshot of the initial state of the dataset is captured by the snapshot job and is used as a baseline for comparison later.
  2. Later, Discovery updates the dataset with CIs that may have changed and this is used as the target for comparison with the baseline.
  3. The comparison job compares the baseline snapshot to the target dataset.
  4. The output of the comparison job can be either used for change management or incident management depending on the use case. 
    The data on the compared CIs can also be used by a comparison service.
  5. The list of detected CIs can be either displayed or exported to the drift report.


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