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CMDB monitoring integration: Benefits and best practices



For decades, IT organizations have benefited from the configuration management database (CMDB) for their service management to ensure a resilient, reliable IT ecosystem for all users. Though difficult to implement and even more difficult to maintain, a well-kept CMDB (whether manual or automated) serves as the canonical source of truth for IT infrastructure, mapping the whole estate in a granular, clinical fashion. As a central repository, a CMDB stores all data about your IT assets and the various relationships and dependencies they have with each other. 


In a fast-changing, dynamic IT world with increasing levels of complexity, including factors like containerization, microservices, and hybrid cloud deployments, a CMDB can help you gain a firm grasp of your IT sprawl and answer pressing, pertinent questions, like: What are our functioning servers? What are the applications that they hold within them? What are the devices that connect these applications across the network? What will be the extent of the damage if this one component fails?


An old CMDB is useless—it's like reading last year's TV guide. IT teams rely on CMDBs either as a first source of information or as a last resort in their troubleshooting efforts when things go wrong. CMDBs are also essential for impact assessment before imparting any major change to the IT infrastructure. That's why a CMDB should be alive and constantly updated to reflect the current state of the IT infrastructure.


CMDBs store configuration items' (CIs) attributes and relationships in the hundreds and, sometimes, thousands in large enterprises. Historically static spreadsheets, CMDBs are now active databases that are well integrated with other tools, such as monitoring solutions. To discover, update, and automatically maintain the CMDB's accuracy, Site24x7 has enabled the integration of its monitoring configurations with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Cloud's CMDB. 

This seamless integration automates a comprehensive mapping of all CIs, with support for parent-child relationships and real-time sync updates for accurate infrastructure management. 


Five ways a comprehensive observability platform helps in maintaining accurate CIs and their relationships through their discovery engines:

  1. In-depth understanding: The CMDB serves as a single source of truth with high cardinality, offering in-depth visibility into your IT infrastructure through an asset's life cycle. Due to its systematic, rigorous recording of all devices, including not-so-easily-discoverable entities, syncing all your monitors with the CMDB helps DevOps teams, site reliability engineers, and ITOps teams track assets in real time.
  2. Impact assessment: Whenever things go wrong, the CMDB-monitoring integration can help you assess the complete impact of an outage instantly as it maps all dependencies, helping establish the extent of the damage. Sound impact assessment leads to better conflict resolution, ensures compliance, and enables faster troubleshooting to ensure business resilience.
  3. Context and correlation: Instead of saying a generic server name is down, the CMDB-integrated monitoring tool can now tell you that a particular database server with a specific IP address is down. By syncing with CMDB data, Site24x7 helps you get contextual information about IT events wherever and whenever they happen, and provides you with adequate context during troubleshooting.
  4. Robust change management: When combined with CMDB data, Site24x7 can help you proactively visualize the overall impact of a planned change to prepare your team and thus reduce the overall risks perceived during an upcoming upgrade or maintenance routine. The CMDB also helps establish baselines for recovery and provides backups of your monitoring configurations to ensure redundancy and make migrations secure.
  5. Automation and continuous improvement: Use Site24x7 to trigger automated actions, such as configuring all monitoring parameters whenever a new device is added to your IT infrastructure. Constantly identifying and executing automation possibilities leads to continuous improvement, which eventually helps cut down the mean time to repair and comfortably meet SLAs.

Benefits of Site24x7 integration with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Cloud's CMDB

1: Centralized access: Once you configure your CMDB in Site24x7, all your monitor inventory details and their subsequent changes will always be synced with ServiceDesk Plus Cloud's CMDB, making it immensely useful to find the relationships between the monitors during troubleshooting.
2: Streamline incident communication: Once configured, use Site24x7’s incident management and alerting features to streamline the flow of incident communication in your monitoring operations.

Best practices for a thorough CMDB integration

To get the most from the automated integration of Site24x7 with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Cloud's CMDB, consider the following four aspects:
  1. Ensure accuracy: Always keep your CMDB up to date with accurate, granular details to make the most out of the monitoring integration with Site24x7.
  2. Develop continuous improvement: Though you begin with your core, critical infrastructure components, go further and constantly expand your CMDB to cover the most granular details.
  3. Establish clear workflows: Set and follow definitive, comprehensive workflows to ensure the best incident response actions and incident-free change management routines.
  4. Improve your tooling: Provide your CMDB with an improved, expansive list of integrations. 
Many monitoring tools, like Site24x7, offer integrations with leading CMDB platforms to enrich monitoring data with asset information and contextual relationships across your CMDBs. ManageEngine Site24x7 integrates instantly with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus' CMDB to synchronize the mapping of the attributes and relationships of every CI in Site24x7 with the CMDB. This unique combination, enabled by ManageEngine's observability platform and its ITSM solution, makes ITOps with ManageEngine more efficient and seamlessly integrates your monitoring with your ITOps.


With the CMDB integration, Site24x7 helps you better understand your infrastructure and dependencies, achieve faster troubleshooting when things go wrong, and pave the way for smoother change management to cut downtime and ensure customer delight. When monitoring configuration sync with the CMDB, IT visibility becomes deeper, leading to better control of your assets. 

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