Item: BMC Helix Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Rating: 9
Author: Gordon Yeh

Overall Satisfaction with BMC Atrium CMDB

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using the BMC Atrium CMDB to keep track of our assets primarily from the parent host system to individual components such as CPU, software, memory, processor etc. The CMDB is quite easy to customize and thus, this is why I really support the BMC's edition of the CMDB. This helps us track our IT assets, how much they cost, and helps us plan for future upgrades.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Managing computer systems & components
Associating costs and financial data
Associating Incidents, Changes, Problems, Releases, etc
Normalizing and Reconciliation Engine

Cons

Better financial systems, depreciation, chargebacks, etc
Easier time to customize the forms

Return on Investment

Moving towards a fully chargeback model would help non-IT departments help curb their spend. However, a company needs to be fully mature in order to do this. Without an iron tight process, the CMDB will be quickly filled with garbage. It'll require experienced asset admins to continuously monitor the system.

Alternatives Considered

The number of workflows, escalations, processes built in the out of the box Remedy is outstanding. Trying to mimic/customize an open source, or even Remedyforce would cost more than implementing a vanilla Remedy.

We reviewed ServiceNow but we felt that in terms of an end-to-end implementation tool, Remedy is still first in class.

Other Software Used

Pentaho, Yellowfin, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

Discovering all of an org's assets is very well suited and associating each asset to other assets. This helps IT get a visual picture of the topology of the company.

Manual updates however, are less suited. I heard that a computer manufacturer used Remedy to help track each component that is used in their computer manufacturing process. However, without an iron tight process, the chance of failure would be high and this would be a highly manual process.

Comments

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BMC Atrium CMDB is still first in class