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 (CI's). 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.
The key features and benefits of the CMS include the following:
Identifies customer assets: You can identify physical and logical assets. These assets are identified within the CMS as Configuration Items (CI's). CI's can be further combined into CI Groups for aggregated identification.
The CMS provides a user interface that enables both customer users and Oracle users to view, add, and modify the CI’s in the data model;
Manages customer assets: You can search for CI's based on multi-criteria conditions, save search conditions, retrieve Level of Service (LOS) information for CI's associated with a detected event, and view customer level statistics associated with a CI.
Provides greater efficiencies and better customer system visibility: CMS service modeling provides a framework that represents the relationships between CI’s. The relationship data are captured from Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) and are made available in CMS in a graphical format and - via APIs - to other models for enhancement functionalities (for example, event flood, performance reporting.) Furthermore, CMS data visualization enables the representation of multiple level parent/child CI relationships, which allows users to model and map complex CI environments.
Enables export to CSV or Microsoft Excel format: You can export lists of configuration items (along with their properties) to CSV and Excel formats 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 CI Browser viewing page provides multiple customizable filtering options, as well as showing configuration item groups and a list of filtered results.
Uses the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) data model which is flexible, extensible, and compatible with OEM.
Provides the required level of information: The CMS dashboard shows the hierarchy of configuration items, and you can drill down to the required level of information.
Provides a user interface that enables both customer users and Oracle users to view, add, and modify the CI’s in the data model;
Synchronizes data, such as CI information, between Oracle Advanced Support Platform and the distributed Oracle Advanced Support Gateways (hereafter referred to as gateways.) In the case of CI information this eliminates the requirement for users to manually import CI data from managed customer environments.
You can access CMS through Oracle Advanced Support Platform and use it to manage CI's and their relationships. CMS feeds this CI and CI Group information to support the operations of Incident Management, Change Management, and the Event Dispatcher. The following sections provide further information:
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 CI's.
Assisting with identification of incidents of similar CI type.
CMS and Change Management: CMS assists Change Management by:
Enabling you to choose CI's 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 CI's.