Product overview

BMC Helix CMDB helps you populate, store, monitor, validate, and manage the data related to your IT infrastructure, including the relationships between all the entities within the infrastructure. This validated data provides a single source of truth of the service model, which is made available to other ITSM applications for performing various service management processes and activities.

With normalization and reconciliation capabilities, along with the ability to extend the data model, BMC Helix CMDB helps increase service reliability through impact simulation and effective management of the asset lifecycle.

Success stories

The organization	The story	References
The configuration manager team at a Fortune 500 company tracks their essential services in real time.	The biggest challenge faced by the configuration managers at a Fortune 500 company is to be able to track thousands of assets and services while making sure they monitor the health of all these assets and services. Everyday, a huge number of assets such as hardware and software undergo various changes from installation to decommissioning and knowing how this affects various critical services is a constant challenge. The configuration managers team uses the data from the CMDB dashboard widget that shows the health of the services. This way they can conduct real-time monitoring of all their services.	Tracking-CI-changes-by-using-Drift-management
The configuration manager team at a multinational IT solutions company improves the accuracy of their database while making sure their configuration management database has data from all sources.	One of the challenges the configuration manager team faced was to import data from all kinds sources bringing in information about the assets or configuration items (CIs) in the IT infrastructure. The configuration managers team has set up the BMC Helix CMDB to be able to import data from all sources such as third-party discovery solutions, spreadsheets, and also BMC Helix Discovery.	Maintaining data integrity in BMC Helix CMDB

Product features and capabilities

The following diagram illustrates the key features and capabilities of the product at a glance:

CMDB product capabilities.png

Simulate impact
Perform impact simulations to assess the impact of changes on the business service. Change managers can also use the Impact Simulator to generate simulation reports for audit or compliance purposes. To learn more see, Impact-simulation.

Federate data
Manage data efficiently by linking to external repositories instead of storing all information directly in the CMDB. The federated data can be additional information not critical to the configuration management. To learn more see, Federated-data.

Access data in multiple ways
BMC Helix CMDB provides open access to data with the following capabilities: Use programmatic access to view and modify data in the BMC Helix CMDB Perform bulk data load such as APIs and Atrium Integrator. Make use of the flexibility of database and platform independence as BMC Helix CMDB is compatible with multiple operating systems For details, see Developing and Maintaining data integrity in BMC Helix CMDB.

access to data icon.png Access data in multiple ways

BMC Helix CMDB provides open access to data with the following capabilities:

Use programmatic access to view and modify data in the BMC Helix CMDB
Perform bulk data load such as APIs and Atrium Integrator.
Make use of the flexibility of database and platform independence as BMC Helix CMDB is compatible with multiple operating systems

For details, see Developing and Maintaining data integrity in BMC Helix CMDB.

Extend the data model
BMC Helix CMDB enables you to extend that data model according to your business requirements by using the class manager. To learn more see, Modifying-the-data-model-by-using-Class-Manager.

Validate the data
By using normalization and reconciliation, BMC Helix CMDB enables you to make sure that your production dataset is a single source of truth that can become a point of reference for all other ITSM applications. To learn more see, Normalization and Reconciliation.

Partition data
BMC Helix CMDB provides logical grouping of data into datasets that ensure alignment with real-world infrastructure. Create intended and actual datasets that you can compare and identify discrepancies. To learn more see, Datasets-to-partition-data.

User roles

The following user roles are available out-of-the-box for BMC Helix CMDB. Users can perform tasks based on the assigned role.
For more information, see Roles-and-permissions.