Discovering configuration items

The configuration items in your environment are discovered by sensors or operational management products.

Discovery is the process of identifying the configuration items (CIs) that exist in your IT infrastructure, including their attributes and how they are related to other CIs. Commonly, information about discovered CIs is stored in the IBM® Tivoli® Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) database. TADDM receives information about CIs in the following ways:

Through a TADDM sensor, a tool that traverses the IT infrastructure to discover specific types of CIs
From an Operational Management Product (OMP), such as Tivoli Provisioning Manager, whose data TADDM imports through its discovery library.

The TADDM database stores CI data using the common data model, which is a standard model for describing configuration items, including their types, attributes, and relationships. For more information about the common data model and about TADDM and its role in the discovery process, see the TADDM documentation.

You are not required to install and use TADDM to discover your IT environment. For example, you can import data in Identity Markup Language (IdML) format directly into Integration Composer with the ImportIDML tool.

Importing discovered data into Maximo IT

Data about discovered CIs is imported into Maximo IT using Integration Composer. Integration Composer is a tool that transforms data from one format to another using an integration adapter. It uses the integration adapter for TADDM, the TADDM adapter, to transform data from the common data model used in TADDM to the format used in the Maximo database. The Maximo database is the data repository that holds descriptions of actual and authorized CIs in Maximo IT. Discovered CIs in TADDM are imported into Maximo IT as actual CIs.

You are not required to import all the discovered CI data that TADDM stores into Maximo IT. There might be some types of CIs that you decide not to manage through Maximo IT's configuration management and change management processes. You can use the CI Types application to choose the types of CIs whose data you import.

Through Integration Composer, you can specify the depth of data that you want to import. For example, a particular top-level configuration item might have seven levels of child CIs defined in the common data model and discovered through a sensor. If you want to manage only the top-level CIs and those at the next two levels, you can specify that only those CIs that belong to those top three levels should be imported into Maximo IT as actual CIs. You can also identify individual types of CIs that must not be imported into Maximo IT.