Generative AI & CMDB

One of the most interesting things I used to love about ITSM platforms was the CMDB - Configuration Management Database. CMDB is like the Heart of your ITSM - Without a Heart , No Life. Without a CMDB , No Service Management

What is a CMDB - Its a Database or Inventory System which stores your Device, Infrastructure components and much more. Lots of Organizations and Teams think a simple Excel sheet with all the device information is the CMDB - No, its not

Here is the ITIL framework v3 - In this, You will notice - CMS - Configuration Management System - CMDB is a part of the CMS. Broader CMS consists of much more than a CMDB

Within CMDB you will find CIs or Configurations Items which includes Hardware, Software and Inventory components

Now, I dont want to bore you with too much information about CMDB - Everyone who is using or building an ITSM process within their orgs is well aware of a CMDB - My main topic for today is How can GenAI make use of a CMDB component in helping out Functional and Technical Teams

How many times has this happened where whenever a Change is to be deployed - Engineers and IT Teams struggle to identify the Business Impact of a Change and connected CIs or CMDB components to minimize the change impact and they have failed miserably -

1. The nationwide Optus outage on November 8, 2023

2. Facebook Global Outage (2021)

3. United Airlines Ground Stop (2015)

There are many more to name and I dont want to go deeper on the vendors and their process. Study shows - Human error contributes to 66-80% of all outages. This includes failing to follow procedures, inadequate procedures, poor training, and the complexity of equipment operation. 44% of companies experienced outages due to network issues, with configuration/change management failures being a top cause

And one of the most important aspect that Change Team misses out is Business impact of their change and Change Dependencies. Many a times, Technical teams miss out that their Change even with Risk assessment submitted can still cause impact on connected Services - They don’t dive deeper into connected CIs or Components.

Now, enough blabbering about the Bad Stuff - Lets get into the Good stuff. In my last blog, I spoke about How Agentic AI can help Agents/Helpdesk teams in raising Changes and reduce Risk ensuring past data co-relation and use RAG to address future changes.

This time, I want to use Agentic AI - And show you How Atom can help in identifying the core components in terms of Creating Changes and Risk Assessment and also identifying connected services to ensure lesser impact and risk on deploying any change

Whenever deploying a Change - You need the complete 360 on the infra - You cannot do a half baked work in terms of change - Thats where Atom’s Intelligence on CMDB comes into play

Here is a short CMDB Model in Atomicwork

I will add more - As I keep building more and more usecases for Atom.

For more such cool ideas on making an Employees life and IT Teams life easier and better - Ping me :)