About Configuration Management System

The Configuration Management System (CMS) constitutes a set of tools and databases that are used to manage the configuration data of a customer's IT infrastructure and services. The CMS contains data about users, suppliers, locations, business units, and customers.

The CMS Browser provides a set of tools for quick searching, viewing, and managing customizable sets of Configuration Items (CIs).

The ability to manipulate configuration data is controlled by roles and privileges and is primarily the domain of Oracle. Customer user privileges are most often focused on read-only and reporting activities.

Key Features and Benefits

The key features and benefits of CMS include the following:

• Identifies Customer Assets

  Enables you to tack and manage physical and logical assets. These assets are identified within the CMS as Configuration Items (CIs). CIs can be further combined into CI Groups to aggregated identification.

• Manages Customer Assets

  Enables you to search for CIs based on multi-criteria conditions, save search conditions, retrieve Level of Service (LOS) information for CIs associated with a detected event, and view customer level statistics associated with a CIs.

• Enables export to CSV or MS Excel format

  You can export lists of configuration items (along with their properties) to CSV and MS Excel format to be fed into other systems or for later analysis. This provides flexibility in viewing configuration items and enables their use in external systems such as billing systems.

• Enables inventory views and management level summarized views

  The CMS Browser page provides multiple customizable filtering options, as well as shows configuration item groups and a list of filtered results.

• Provides the required level of information

  The CMS System Dashboard shows the hierarchy of configuration items, and users are able to drill down to the required level of information.

CMS Dependencies

You can access CMS through Oracle Advanced Support Portal and use it to manage CIs and their relationships. CMS feeds this CI and CI Group information to support the operations of Incident Management, Change Management, and the Event Dispatcher.

CMS and Incident Management

CMS assists Incident Management by:

• Providing valuable information about how much of the IT infrastructure is affected.

• Providing up-to-date information about customers, owners and status of CIs.

• Assisting with identification of incidents of similar CI type.

CMS and Change Management

CMS assists Change Management by:

• Enabling you to choose CIs and assets as targets of a change.

• Providing CMS relationship information to assess the potential impact on end-users and the IT infrastructure when a particular CI is taken offline.

• Providing up-to-date information about customers, owners and status of CIs.

CI Relationships

A relationship defines the link between two CIs. Relationships represent the dependencies and connections between the entities in a customer's IT environment. The same attributes defined for CI types are defined for relationships also.

CMS defines a set of rules that governs the creation of relationships between CIs to ensure that only valid relationships are created.

Implied/Contextual Relationships

Contextual relationships are those that are created based on the context of the user when creating a new CI. For example, a computer system to operating system relationship is always contextual. The user never explicitly creates a relationship between the two items. Instead, the relationship is inferred based on the computer system that was visible when the user clicks the add operating system link. The table below outlines the contextual relationships that are supported by the CMS.

We can consider that the graph of implied relationships for a set of related CIs is a tree.

Source Class	Target Class	Description
Physical System	Large systems	Large systems such as Exadata, are installed on a physical system. Physical elements can be nested to form trees.
Computer System	Operating System	An operating system is installed on a computer system. The computer system item may represent a physical or a virtual machine.
Operating System	Application	An application is installed on an operating system. Most applications are only valid within the context of an operating system.
Computer System	Application	An application that is installed on a computer system. This covers a subset of applications, which are not considered operating systems, which can be installed directly onto a computer system. Examples include hypervisor software like xVM Server and VMWare. Service processor firmware can also be modeled this way.

Explicit Relationships

Explicit relationships are relationships between configuration items that must be explicitly created by the end users. The user will choose the source configuration item, the relationship type, and the target configuration item.

Source Class	Target Class	Description
Computer System	Computer System	Clustered
Location	Location	Models the location hierarchy. For example, a building contains a room.
Location	Computer System	A particular location contains a computer system.
Service	Computer System	Business service is hosted by computer system.
Computer System	Operating System	OS is running on computer system.
Service	Application	Business service is implemented by software application.

CMS Browser User Interface Overview

This section provides a description of the CMS Browser controls and features that enable Oracle Advanced Support Portal users to access and manage their Configuration Items (CIs).

The scope of actions available to you in CMS Browser depends on your organization:

• Service delivery users can access CIs that belong to their customers and can manage CIs they are authorized to access.

• Customer users can access their own CIs only. Customer users are allowed to search and view detailed information on their own CIs only.

Figure 4-1 provides an example of the CMS Browser page. The following sections explain the three main areas of the page:

• Filter Area

• Groups Area

• Filtered Results Table

Figure 4-1 CMS Browser

Filter Area

Use the Filter option to select multiple CIs based on multiple criteria. There are four filters in CMS Browser. Each filter consists of the following elements:

• List of filter parameters

  • Status

    Status of the CI, such as Staging, Production, or Retired.

  • Category

    Category of the CI, such as Physical Element, Computer System, Application System, Operating System, or Service.

  • CI Name

    Name of the CI.

  • Make

    The vendor or manufacturer for the CI, such as Oracle or IBM.

  • Model

    The model of the CI, such as Sun Fire E25K. This option depends on the value of the Make parameter.

  • Type

    The type of CI, such as Server or UNIX.

  Note:

  You can specify multiple filter parameters in any order. For each filter, the set of options displayed in the list depends on the previously selected filter options

• The Filter text box

  To refine your search, enter a desired value in the Filter text box

• List of items that match the specified conditions

  Select an item to reduce the results

• Show Result link

  Select an item from the list and then click Show Result.

  The system displays the CIs for the selected item in the Filtered Results table.

Groups Area

Use the Groups option to group CIs. Instead of managing inventory as a set of individual CIs, you can group them together logically and associate functions or attributes at the group level. This minimizes CMS administration work and increases data quality in CMS.

The Groups option contains the following two group types:

• Smart CI Groups

  Smart CI groups are defined by a set of criteria. Oracle Advanced Support Portal maintains the exact list of CIs automatically in each smart group. In the CMS Browser, these group names are displayed in the Smart Groups page in the Groups area.

• Static CI Groups

  Static CI groups are defined by the exact list of CIs. Users must add or remove CIs manually to the Static CI groups. In the CMS Browser, these group names are displayed in the Static Groups page in the Groups area

Filtered Results Table

The result set of CIs that meets the filtering criteria or belongs to the selected CI group. Click any column to reorder the list. Click the name of the CI to access the Configuration Item Dashboard. From the Configuration Item Dashboard, you can view or modify the CI information. For more information about the Configuration Item Dashboard, see About the Configuration Item Dashboard.