User interface overview

CMDB Portal, the user interface of BMC Helix CMDB, provides a centralized platform for managing and configuring your CMDB components, offering comprehensive control and visibility over your configuration data.

Through this intuitive interface, a configuration manager can monitor the health of CIs and define health criteria, oversee normalization and reconciliation jobs, and manage datasets and data sources. A configuration manager can also manage the classes and attributes and set up logging.

CMDB Portal Dashboard page

The following animation shows the various components of the dashboard of an example CMDB Portal user interface:

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CMDB Portal is designed to help you get a quick update on the state of the database while also giving fast access to most of the core functionalities required to manage your database. For more information, see Configuring-Key-Performance-Indicators-for-CMDB.

CMDB Explorer page

Search any CI in the search widget and then open it in the CMDB Explorer.

In CMDB Explorer, you can perform the following activities:

View the parent and child CIs.
Simulate the impact of the CI within the IT infrastructure.

For more information see, Searching-and-viewing-CIs-and-relationships-in-CMDB-Explorer.

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Normalization, reconciliation, and Integration pages

Use these pages to create, schedule, and edit jobs that enable the following tasks:

Normalization to standardize the data in accordance with the product catalog.
Reconciliation of the data to make sure there are no duplicate CIs and the data has good reliability for use in other ITSM applications.
Integration to schedule jobs that import data from multiple sources.

For more information, see Managing-consistency-of-CMDB-data-by-using-normalization, Reconciliation-Engine-configuration-settings, and Transferring-data-from-external-data-stores-to-BMC-Helix-CMDB.

Datasource pages

Add and manage data providers from which you can bring in data into datasets. This helps you structure your data to reflect the logical grouping of real-world infrastructure.

For more information, see Adding-data-sources-in-CMDB.

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CI updates, creation, and dynamic service modeling pages

These pages enable you to perform the following activities:

View the latest CIs that are added to your datasets.
Create new CIs that need to be added to a dataset.
Search CIs with queries that associate a CI to a specific service to build a service model that can later be used for impact simulation.

For more information see, Working-with-CIs-and-relationships, and Creating-service-models-by-using-Dynamic-Service-Modeling.

Class management and federation pages

Perform the following activities by using these pages:

Create new classes to align with your business requirements.
Add sources of federated data that hold non-critical data in external repositories.

For more information, see Creating-or-modifying-classes-by-using-Class-Manager.

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CMDB configuration, impact simulation, and product catalog pages

These pages allow you to perform the following activities:

Perform various configurations that are required for the processes and functioning of BMC Helix CMDB.
For more information, see Administering.
Launch the Impact Simulator where you can analyze impact and create reports.
For more information, see Simulating-the-impact-of-changes-to-CIs.
Launch the Product Catalog.
For more information, see Configuring-the-Product-Catalog-for-normalization.