Maintaining data integrity in BMC Helix CMDB

Integrate BMC Helix CMDB with discovery data sources, scan your company's IT environment, and populate the CMDB with that data. 

For the data that is not captured by the discovery data sources but is critical in maintaining your IT infrastructure, use Atrium Integrator. Atrium Integrator transforms information from sources such as spreadsheets, CSV, XML, and similar files into coherent, usable CI data into BMC Helix CMDB.

Related topics

Transferring-data-from-external-data-stores-to-BMC-Helix-CMDB

The following image represents the different data sources that import data into CMDB:

Data integrity graphic 2025-2-11.png

You can achieve the following benefits by integrating different data sources with BMC Helix CMDB:

  • Automatically discover new CI's added to the IT environment.
  • Automatically update information about CIs after they are modified.
  • Schedule jobs to automate the discovery and updates to already discovered CIs.

Scenario

Apex Global needs to consolidate its IT departments by populating BMC Helix CMDB with the data from the various IT departments. Some IT data resides in spreadsheets or in databases. In some cases, data must be discovered. This disparate data from various IT departments must be moved to BMC Helix CMDB so that Apex Global has a complete picture of the components in its IT department. While discovery tools bring in data of the IT environment, some existing data in flat files in CSV format is transferred to BMC Helix CMDB with Atrium Integrator.

Discovery of the IT environment

Apex Global uses the following​​​​ BMC Discovery tools:

  • Apex Global uses BMC Client Management to discover hardware and software inventory information about servers, desktops, laptops, and handheld devices. 
  • Apex Global uses BMC Discovery to build a topology of applications and infrastructure including switches, servers, operating systems, software, configuration files and logs, business applications and dependencies. Apex Global then uses the CMDB Sync function of BMC Discovery to map the collected information and transfer the CIs and their relationships to BMC Helix CMDB.

Data import into BMC Helix CMDB from sources such as databases, flat files, and XML

Apex Global needs to transfer its existing data about processors, disk drives, printers, and so on to their centralized database in New York. This data resides in multiple databases, flat files, and XML files in various locations across the globe. Apex Global wants to transfer information from its Chicago, London, Dublin, and Adelaide sites to their New York centralized database. Apex Global also wants to transfer the personnel records of employees from the Dublin site to the New York site.

Apex Global administrator, Allen Allbrook, prepares his CMDB for Atrium Integrator, creates and runs an Atrium Integrator job, verifies its success, and schedules it to run repeatedly.

Normalization and Reconciliation

After the data is added to the datasets in CMDB, Allen must configure the normalization job. The Normalization process maps the attribute values for the CIs and makes sure that the information about the CIs is consistent and aligned with the nomenclature defined by Apex Global. Normalization uses the information from the Product Catalog to update these values for all the CIs from the datasets included in the normalization job. 

The normalized CIs are then reconciled through the reconciliation jobs. Allen configures the reconciliation job to identify the duplicate CIs and merge them with the attribute values. 

Workflow for importing data from multiple data sources

Data integrity_data flow.png

Product | Component | Console

User

Action

Reference

BMC Discovery

CMDBAdministrator

Integrate BMC Helix CMDB with discovery tools such as BMC Discovery to import discovered data into the CMDB.

Atrium Integrator

Configuration Manager

Import data from database tables of a discovery source and transform it by creating jobs in Atrium Integrator or Atrium Integrator Spoon.

Normalization

Configuration Manager

Manage data consistency by updating the attribute values for CIs by running normalization jobs.

Reconciliation

Configuration Manager

Identify and merge duplicate CIs from different datasets by using the reconciliation jobs. 

Results

Data from inputs, such as LDAP, AR System forms, ITSM forms, and those requiring complex staging tasks or complex data manipulations is imported and transformed by using the Atrium Integrator and is added to the CMDB.

 

 

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