Deciding which CI types to manage
The second step in planning for configuration management is to narrow down the list of configuration items and attributes that are present in your environment to those you will manage.
After you have reviewed the CIs that have been discovered in your environment, you must decide which types of CIs you will manage, and which attributes of each CI type are of interest. Choose some high-priority types of CIs, based on your business requirements, and study the structure of the actual CIs that have been discovered. Use reports and queries to see where the individual CIs of each type are similar and different. Here are some questions that will help you identify the types of CIs to manage:
- Which types of CIs do you want to put under change control, so that they can be changed only under a structured process?
- Which types of CIs do you want to audit? Auditing compares the actual and authorized versions of a CI and flags discrepancies. This helps you to identify unauthorized changes and other problems.
- Are there types of CIs for which you want to be able to identify times when they can or cannot be removed from service for maintenance or upgrades?
- Which types of CIs do you want to include in reports? These might be periodic status reports, records for archiving, or any other reports that help your business succeed.
- Review trouble tickets or service requests to identify the key attributes of each type of CI. Are there more problems associated with CIs that have certain attributes? Are there other attributes that are unrelated to any problems and might not need to be managed?
Another useful resource is the best-practice default authorized CI space definitions delivered with the Deployer's Workbench. Review these default definitions in the Deployer's Workbench user interface, and read about them in the information provided with the Deployer's Workbench, in order to learn about the authorized CI classifications and promotion scopes that they include.
After you choose which CIs to manage, you must decide which attributes of each CI type you want to manage. You will use this information to create an authorized CI space that includes only the CI types and attributes that you want to manage. Managing only the important CI types and attributes will make every operation, from importing data to promoting CIs to running audits, run faster, because less data is being manipulated.
Another aspect of managing CIs is assigning them to lifecycles. The lifecycle that you assign to a classification of CIs determines the states, or status values, that those CIs can have. You should design your lifecycles and assign them to CI classifications before you create authorized CIs. Review the information under Managing CI Lifecycles to learn about CI lifecycles.