The Shape and Form of the Body of Knowledge
The body of knowledge is best implemented as a software model with a well-defined interface that allows it to be queried and updated by other software applications that automate systems management tasks. There are several benefits to doing this, including the following:
- It serves as a single source of all configuration information, including:
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- Prescriptive configurations.
- Best practices.
- It allows for the capture and tracking of configuration states and changes.
- It provides a standard platform for:
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- Operational management.
- Coordination and consistency.
- Design and development.
- It aids change management via:
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- Model-based validation.
- Dependency and impact analysis.
- Configuration management and updates are dynamically and automatically performed, ensuring accuracy.
The information in the knowledge base is of different data types. Portions of it, such as the objects in the topology and their attributes, lend themselves to be managed as records in a database; other parts of it, such as descriptive information about processes, are text, while certain aspects, such as the creation of a configuration file, may be expressed in programming terms.
The knowledge base has to grow and evolve over a period of time and capture the enterprise’s experience of managing its systems. The knowledge base also has to adapt and change as the systems in the enterprise change. The realization that a large part of the information in the knowledge base has to be collaboratively created by its users is key its growth and evolution.
The organization and the extensibility aspects of the knowledge base are well addressed by the adoption of Web 2.0 techniques of collaboration and semantic organization. Internally, the knowledge base is often implemented using several tools, including Wiki-like tools for collaborative documentation, workflow tools for incident management, and data structures implemented using relational/XML/object databases for topology representation, automated incident detection, and so on. Today’s CMDB tools do not yet provide all the structures and interfaces required to represent and use the knowledge base. They form an essential part of the implementation and capture details, such as the system topology and the configuration information, but the information in them must still be augmented.
Standards in this space are still emerging with the System Definition Model and Dynamic Systems Initiative providing possibly the closest answer to a widely accepted standard.
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