The CMDB Is A Consultant's Myth

Update: Looks like the author has wisely taken his post down.

So, based on recommendations of a friend of a friend, I've been casually reading up on ITIL, including adding a few ITIL bloggers (yes, there are ITIL bloggers) to my blogroll.

So, I come across this gem in my feeds today:

The CMDB is, first and foremost, an application system. It is not an infrastructure service (like networking), nor is it a core operating system, nor is it middleware. It is an application to be used in the fulfillment of use cases that add value to the efforts of stakeholders.

(My emphasis added.)

I've long thought that the CMDB is just a bunch of crap. What is the (usually 'the', not 'a') CMDB? Well, it stands for 'configuration management database', but as far as I can tell the term is entirely meaningless. It's basically what the whole ITIL world has concluded they don't understand, wrapped into a thing and named.

If the above is a definition of a CMDB, I'll eat my shorts.

The article is apparently a rant, explaining how everyone else is just a pretender because they aren't all super-architect/developer/sysadmin ninjas like the author is.

Ugh. This stuff just drives me nuts. If the CMDB were something real, like a web server or an LDAP service, then you could talk about the actual product, instead of a bunch of "you're not good enough" crap. Just once I'd love to see someone talk about what the CMDB is, rather than what it isn't, in plain terms. I'm not convinced it's possible, because I'm not convinced anyone knows what it is.

This just seems so much like the ERP debacle of the last 15 years or so, where very large companies all competed for who could waste the most money on a product they didn't understand. "We don't know what it is, but we're sure we need it." Just like the ERP crap, any real solution depends on stand-alone, decoupled systems working through abstract interfaces. That means no huge monolithic applications that no one understands and no one can maintain, and it means replacing existing systems, not just layering on top like drywall mud.

It doesn't hurt that this blogger actually calls his blog "ERP for IT", which should say enough right there. "We don't know what it is, but we sure know it's profitable to the consultants and vendors."

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 | Tags: industry, itil, cmdb, crap

Further research into ITIL

I'm still trying to figure out whether ITIL really makes sense, either in terms of usage or marketing. I went to a local itSMF meeting yesterday, and I would say it was inconclusive. It was clearly very guideline-oriented, rather than action-oriented, which makes it tougher to tell whether it's directly useful.

Charlie Schluting also sent me a link to an article on ITIL that he wrote, and he's pretty convincing that I should at least be looking at it and talking to my customers about it. It sounds like it'd initially be most useful to those who don't currently have good process, but I'll do my best to spend some time on it trying to sync terminology, because that's certainly one area where sysadmins could use some help.

Fri, 25 May 2007 | Tags: sysadmin, itil, process