Federating Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs)

The CMDB Federation work is a collaboration that involves BMC, CA,
Fujitsu, HP, IBM, and Microsoft. The CMDB Federation Workgroup recently
announced the publication of an industry-wide draft specification for
sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs)
and other management data repositories (MDRs), such as asset management
systems and service desks. The specification, which the group plans to
submit as a standard, is intended to enable organizations to federate
and access information from complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures.
The draft specification defines query and registration web services for
interaction between a federating CMDB and an MDR, based on HTTP, SOAP,
WSDL, XML Schema, and Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) standards.
A federating CMDB can access data from a participating MDR using the
query service defined in the specification and implemented by the MDR.
A client of a federating CMDB can also use the query service to extract
data from another federating CMDB, making it possible for a CMDB to
hierarchically federate with other federating CMDBs. An MDR can also
export data to a CMDB that has implemented a registration service. The
federated CMDB is a "collection of services and data repositories that
contain configuration and other data records about resources. The term
'resource' includes configuration items (e.g., a computer system, an
application, or a router), process artifacts (e.g., an incident record,
a change record), and relationships between configuration item(s) and/or
process artifact(s). The architecture describes a logical model and does
not necessarily reflect a physical manifestation. CMDBs give IT
organizations complete visibility into the attributes, relationships,
and dependencies of the components in their enterprise computing
environments. An industry standard for federating and accessing IT
information will integrate communication between IT management tools.
With a standard way for vendors and tools to share and access
configuration data, organizations can use their CMDBs to create a more
complete and accurate view of IT information spread out across multiple
data sources. This makes it easier to keep track of changes to an IT
environment, such as the last time an application was updated or changes
to critical configuration information. It also helps organizations
better understand the impact of changes they make to the IT environment. CLICK HERE