Tracking CI changes by using Drift management

By tracking changes in the IT environment, you can audit, verify, and manage infrastructure changes to ensure stability and compliance. Drift management helps maintain alignment between the current and expected state of your IT environment.

Drift management includes the following benefits:

  • Maintain infrastructure integrity by identifying and resolving discrepancies.
  • Maintain operational compliance with business rules and regulations.
  • Streamline audits by providing clear insights into infrastructure changes.

Related topics

Tracking-configuration-drift

End-to-end-drift-management-example

Scenario

Scenario

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

Allen Allbrooke is a CMDB administrator at Apex Global and he wants to create a report of the changes the IT environment has undergone within a time period. He performs the following comparisons to know the changes:

  • Comparison of the current state of 

    BMC Helix CMDB

     with a snapshot
    Allen wants to determine whether drift has occurred over a period of time. He creates a snapshot of BMC Helix CMDB at a given point in time to define the baseline for future comparisons, and later compares the current state (your target) with the baseline. 

  • Comparison with a standard state for compliance
    Allen compares the state of the BMC Helix CMDB with a baseline to make sure that the physical state does not drift from the declared standard. This scenario is commonly referred to as the golden server or golden CI. Within the CMDB, Allen maintains CIs for a crucial business service, such as security, that are configured exactly as required. These CIs are the baseline against which other security servers (targets) are compared to verify they match the declared standard.
    A golden CI is meticulously configured and used as the reference point for aligning target CIs to the desired standard.

  • Comparison between a test dataset and 

    BMC Helix CMDB

    Allen defines a test or sandbox dataset over an existing dataset to evaluate the impact of potential modifications in the test dataset on the CMDB. In this scenario, the CMDB is the baseline, and the test dataset serves as the target. Using the CMDB API, Allen performs a comparison that simulates a merge between the two datasets to assess their alignment and potential changes.

Drift management workflow

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The following table describes the high-level steps of drift management workflow:


Action

Reference

1

Create snapshots to define the standard configuration as per the business requirement. 

2

Create a baseline to establish a standard against which the changes in the CIs are tracked. 

3

Identify a configuration drift from the standard configuration by creating a comparison job in drift management, and generate drift reports.

4 and 5

View the drift reports that are generated after running a comparison job. 


 

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