Tracking changes to CIs and relationships

This use case describes how to keep track of the changes to CIs and relationships in the BMC CMDB using the auditing feature of BMC Remedy AR System to track changes to instance data. You enable BMC CMDB auditing on a per-class basis, and you select which attributes trigger an audit and which are written as a result.

If you use BMC Asset Management with BMC CMDB, you could instead track changes with the Compare Dataset reconciliation activity.

Tracking changes to CIs and relationships scenario

Scenario

Calbro Services needs to have a detailed account of the changes that have occurred to CIs and relationships.

Tracking changes using auditing. The Calbro Services administrator knows that changes to the service model can be disruptive to the customers using those services. To help identify all of the changes to business services and the supporting technical services, the administrator decides to audit the BMC_BusinessService class. The Calbro Services administrator configures copy auditing for this class in the Class Manager. Copy auditing creates a copy of each audited instance. When you enable Copy auditing for a class, each form pertaining to that class is duplicated to create audit forms that hold audited instances. This includes forms from superclasses, because they hold data for instances of their subclasses. The audit forms are automatically named with the suffix :AUDIT.

Copy auditing this class does not affect overall system performance because changes to the BMC_BusinessService class are few in number. Copy auditing also enables greater ability to search for changes to the class.

Tracking changes using the Compare Dataset reconciliation activity in BMC Asset Management. The Calbro Services administrator enables the Sandbox dataset (BMC.ASSET.SANDBOX) in BMC Asset Management, so that user edits to a CI are saved to the Sandbox dataset. Then the administrator creates a reconciliation job with a Compare Dataset activity that compares the Sandbox to BMC Asset, looking for the particular differences that the administrator wants to catch. The administrator then performs a custom workflow against instances found by the comparison.

Tracking changes to CIs and relationships workflow

Product \| Component \| Console	User	Action	Reference
Class Manager	Configuration manager	Selecting the instances and attributes to be included in the audit.	Creating-or-modifying-classes-by-using-Class-Manager
AR System Administrator	Configuration manager	Set up events subscriptions and event channels to receive CI change events.	Receiving-CI-change-events-with-Event-Channels
Class Manager	Configuration manager	Enable auditing for specific classes to identify changes to CIs and relationships.	Enabling-audits-for-classes-and-attributes
BMC Asset Management	Asset manager	Run a compare dataset activity between the sandbox and the BMC Asset.	BMC Asset Management

Tracking changes to CIs and relationships results

Calbro Service can now track the changes to CIs and relationships.

Tracking changes to CIs and relationships benefits

Tracking changes allows Calbro Services to make sure their business services are monitored for changes thereby empowering them to avoid service interruptions.