Planning to use federated data

Use data federation in BMC Helix CMDB to access and view external data sources without importing them into the database, ensuring real-time data availability while maintaining system efficiency.

The following data types are the most common types of federated data:

• Related information or information about a CI that does not itself qualify as a CI and therefore should not be stored in a CMDB.
• Detailed attributes are attributes of CIs stored in BMC Helix CMDB, but they are attributes that are not important enough to track at the level of a CMDB.

A few examples of federated data are invoices, purchase orders, and printer maintenance records.

By federating non-essential data outside the CMDB, you achieve the following benefits:

• CMDB is easier to manage when it has only the essential data.
• CMDB is more efficient and has better performance.

In BMC Helix CMDB, not only can you view federated data but you can also retrieve that data for use by a consuming application as if it were part of BMC Helix CMDB. This feature enables you to access outside data from the central CMDB repository by using your existing data store infrastructure.

The following figure illustrates both types of federation data for a BMC_ComputerSystem instance named Computer A. The instance can be linked to incident records about Computer A, which is related information, and also linked to the discovered attributes of Computer A that were not imported into BMC Helix CMDB:

By using the Federation Manager plug-ins, you can connect the BMC Helix CMDB to external data sources and federate data from different types of repositories. The following figure illustrates the concept of federation between BMC Helix CMDB and a federated Oracle database: