Key concepts
IT departments must provide reliable services that align with business goals, but this is impossible without a solid Configuration Management strategy. BMC Helix CMDB addresses this by serving as a central source of truth, enabling organizations to identify, manage, and verify all configuration items (CIs) in their IT environments. With growing adoption of ITIL standards, businesses increasingly recognize the value of a Configuration Management System (CMS) to deliver a clear, logical model of their IT infrastructure, supporting better decision-making and operational efficiency.
Understanding the key concepts of BMC Helix CMDB is crucial for effectively managing IT assets and their relationships. These concepts, such as the architecture, data model, impact simulation, normalization, and reconciliation, provide the foundation for better data integration, analysis, and decision-making and ultimately, improved service management.
This section provides a high-level overview of the concepts and features of BMC Helix CMDB. The following table provides a list of the key concepts that will give you a better understanding of how BMC Helix CMDB works:
Task | Reference |
|---|---|
Understand the key components of BMC Helix CMDB and how they interact with other applications. | |
Learn how service models help visualize the impact of CI failures on the different services. | |
Learn how data partitioning helps segregate CIs from different data sources. | |
Learn how BMC Helix CMDB empowers you to simulate a proposed change to your IT environment and then analyze the simulated impact of that change on a business service. | |
Understand how normalization makes sure that the product names and categorization are consistent across different datasets and from different data providers. | |
Learn how the reconciliation process helps clean up the CI data for the consuming applications by eliminating duplicate data, retaining only relevant information, and storing asset data that is correct and complete. | |
Learn how the information in a Product Catalog is critical to making the CI data consistent across all data sources. | |
Understand the relationships between out-of-the-box classes and understand the inheritance of attributes from the parent classes to the child classes. | |
Understand how you can access and view external data sources without importing them into the database to maintain system efficiency. | |
Learn how Service Context in BMC Helix CMDB helps employees view critical health information about other applications in a consistent and summarized format. | |
Use the glossary to quickly refer to specific terminology used in BMC Helix CMDB. |