The Service-now.com Configuration Management Database (CMDB) provides a single point of visibility for IT to track the relationships of services to underpinning IT assets and configuration items. With our vision to develop a market defining set of integrated applications that extends IT Service Management to “ERP for IT”, the Service-now.com CMDB is the single system of reference for all IT processes.

IT Staff gain visibility into how their work interacts and depends on others in seemingly different and unrelated areas. Silos are broken down within global organizations allowing visibility into who is doing what, with what priority and on behalf of which customer.

End Users see the health of business services that IT supports with accompanying information on their future state such as incidents, pending change requests and releases.

It is our opinion that a CMDB offers little value to anyone if it isn’t highly integrated to the processes it supports, in particular, incident management, problem management, change management and release management. Successful process management is impossible without supporting information from the CMDB. Integrating ITIL processes with the CMDB will offer the following benefits:

Incident Management – Restoration of service is streamlined by prioritizing incoming requests, based on CI criticality, business impact and service level agreements.

Problem Management - Mean-Time-To-Repair is reduced by optimizing problem control, error control, known errors, and root-cause analysis.

Change Management - Change managers get critical visibility into the relationships of infrastructure and the business services they support, significantly reducing risk of change impact throughout the IT environment.

Configuration Management - Enables the consistent, accurate, and cost-effective identification, control, status accounting, and verification of all CIs in the CMDB.

Release Management - The CMDB provides accurate information about hardware, software, and current configurations that enables automated software release, as well as back-out procedures, collision avoidance and project scheduling.

To help populate the CMDB we support integrations with a number of 3rd party discovery technologies and offer our own Discovery technology that  populates and maintains an accurate and up to date CMDB.