News 2006
Netuitive Reveals Why Your CMDB Won't Count Without Analytics
Reston, VA – February 15, 2006 – Executives from Netuitive, Inc., the leader in real-time analysis software for business service management (BSM), today substantiated why Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) are often ineffective without analytics. As the industry focuses on aligning their IT and business objectives, many organizations are overlooking a critical requirement for IT management - analytics. A recent Enterprise Management Associates survey, The CMDB Landscape: Market Directions, Vendor Solutions and IT deployments, showed that 34 percent of organizations are using CMDB for Incident and Problem Management. However, the CMDB alone does not solve the fundamental challenge that organizations are attempting to address.
The Need for Real-Time Analytics
e industry is focusing on CMDB as a core component of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for effective business service management (BSM). According to ITIL, the CMDB should hold among other things, the relationships between all system components including incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases. However, without analytics the CMDB is a storage repository with no intelligence taking place. Real-time analysis software makes the data within the CMDB useable for Incident and Problem Management by self-learning the relationship dependencies between configuration items and automatically identifying the root-cause of service-level degradations. Based on lessons learned from Netuitive's worldwide customer base, the company offers tips on how to get the most out of a CMDB initiative:
Tip #1: Make the CMDB work for you—While the CMDB consolidates the configuration items into a single database, it does not understand the changing performance relationships between them. The environment is so dynamic that a static model cannot possibly reflect the ever-changing behavior of the service. Analytics, more than anything, will enable IT to manage and deliver services effectively in the face of change. CMDB alone does not determine root-cause, however coupled with analytics, which can identify root-cause automatically; the CMDB becomes an ultimate enabler for Incident and Problem Management and BSM.
According to Dennis Drogseth, Vice President at Enterprise Management Associates, "Many IT professionals are relying on expert opinion most of the time to diagnose a problem, while less than 30 percent rely on off-the-shelf tools. Without well focused intelligence, such as analytics, in how data is gathered, shared, examined, visualized and acted upon, you're inviting human failure as well as forcing expensive professionals to spend too much time in administrative overhead."
Tip #2: Weathering the "alert storm"—It is not uncommon today for an IT organization to receive thousands of false alerts daily. Without analytics there is no way to determine if a given alert is part of the symptom, the underlying problem or an anomaly. Real-time analysis software does what no IT manager can possibly do manually: it self-learns and continuously analyzes an environment's changing operational rhythms in real-time to identify behavior changes that affect overall quality of service.
Simply implementing a CMDB doesn't mean an IT organization has reached ITIL nirvana. Companies that are contemplating CMDB are making a huge mistake if they're also not considering analytics.
"CMDB for Incident and Problem Management cannot be effective without analytics, bottom line," said Nicola Sanna, CEO and President for Netuitive. "There is no way that any human being can comprehend the thousands of simultaneous, changing variables that relate to IT performance. Analytics software is what will make your CMDB come alive."
About Netuitive, Inc.
Netuitive provides predictive analytics software for IT. Netuitive replaces human guesswork with automated mathematics and analysis to forecast, identify and resolve IT performance issues before they impact quality of service. Hundreds of customers, including seven of the 10 largest banks, rely on Netuitive to proactively manage the performance and capacity of their their IT infrastructures — physical, virtual and cloud. Industry recognition includes the 2010 CODiE Award for "Best Systems Management Solution," the 2010 EMA Award for “Best Analytics,” and the 2009 "Best of VMworld" Award for Virtualization Management. For more information, visit www.netuitive.com.