Re: CIM for CMDB?

Re: CIM for CMDB?

Thanks for your message at 04:59 AM 5/10/2012. Your message was:
>Hello dear list readers,
>
>I am new on this list and am searching for some 
>advice. The mailing list is probably not exactly 
>the right place to ask the following but I hope 
>I may get some advice or some pointers where to 
>go from here and read further on.
>
>The systems department of the data center at the 
>university where I work strives to introduce a 
>holistic monitoring system. Every service and 
>it's components - be it physical or logical - as 
>well as the relationship to other services and 
>their components shall be recorded, changes 
>tracked and the whole thing beeing visualised. 
>The aim is to have a tool or a solution that 
>allows to enter and edit the relevant data, as 
>well as to show a recent map of the dependencies 
>between those items. With ITIL part of this 
>called a CMDB, I would say it's a database with 
>a frontend to enter and view your stuff and 
>certain amount of interfaces allowing you to 
>update the changes that are being done in your infrastructure.
>Later on, we want to connect this CMDB to a 
>monitoring software such as Nagios or Shinken.
>
>As far as I have searched and read docs about 
>this topic the Common Information Model (CIM) 
>should be a great data model to describe the CIs 
>and their relations and eventually save them to 
>a database. But I haven't found such a solution, 
>yet. At least none that is based on an open 
>source License and is using CIM as the data model in the database.

That is correct but management is about more than 
just the model. That is why CIM developed the 
concept of the profile, to defined management as 
a service for defined targets including: the 
model components for those targets, how the 
components of the model interact, and what 
services the profile provides to the client.  In 
effect profiles add specificity and behavior 
standards to the model to accomplish a specific management service.

>Do you know of any CMDB that uses CIM as the 
>database schema? This relates to Relational DBs 
>but maybe there are other products that solve 
>this with a NoSQL DB or an object oriented DB respectively.

There is a CMDB workgroup within DMTF and 
addressing this question to that group would be 
useful. Within the OpenPegasus community we have 
concentrated largely on the infrastructure 
components necessary to satisfy the DMTF 
specifications (CIMServer, CIMProviders that 
provide information to the server, CIMClients, 
etc.). To ge honest we have not really worked 
with the CMDB group at all to date.

>In the beginning of this project, I thought I 
>could just start by describing e.g. a mail 
>server infrastructure with a self invented XML 
>derivative. As I was hacking the first lines, I 
>felt like reinventing the wheel and thus googled 
>around searching for XML Schema files that 
>already describe the base for what I was doing.
>That's how I came to CIM. I downloaded all XSD 
>files of CIM and skimmed over them. Overwhelmed 
>by the mass of stuff, I scratched my head and found my self lost.

You want to start by looking for profiles and 
subprofiles that satisfy your need.  When 
defining something that does not exist in CIM 
profiles today (even if it is the model) start by 
understanding the general concepts of the profile 
and defining what you want to accomplish in terms 
of a profile.  That way you are not just defining 
models but the management behavior you want to 
accomplish.   This profile then is the base for 
defining components to provide this management functionality.

>I also skimmed through the CIM tutorial. It is 
>some kind of explanatory but I find it not to be 
>not much like a real tutorial. Probably I 
>missunderstood the whole thing somehow. But I 
>thought that if I read it, I would not only get 
>a basic understanding of CIM but also see and 
>learn some examples so I could continue writing 
>my own XML files using conforming to CIM.
>
>The CIM Tool 
>(http://wiki.cimtool.org/index.html) seems 
>coming close to this but it more relates to messages not to a CMDB

And it was created for a very specific purpose.

>Well, this message is very long already and I 
>could even write more, but I will first wait and 
>see if anyone of you answers to me.

You are asking good questions.  While the DMTF, 
SNIA, etc. are all working toward the general 
goal of holositic management the work today is certainly not complete

>Kind regards and thank you in advance
>
>
>--
>
>Timo Veith                             Tel:  +49-7071-29-70389
>Universität Tübingen                   Fax:  +49-7071-29-5912
>Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung          Mail: timo.veith <at> uni-tuebingen.de
>Wächterstraße 76
>72074 Tübingen
>
>
>

Karl Schopmeyer                   Inova Development Inc.
305 Spring Creek Village, Suite 475 -  Dallas TX, 75248 USA
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