Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Features | Device42 Software

The difference between CMDB and IT Asset Management (ITAM) comes down to how configuration items (CI’s), and assets are identified. CI’s are components that are managed in order to deliver an IT service, while an IT asset is defined as anything with positive monetary value for a company. Assets and CI’s are different but sometimes, there’s a direct relationship, like with a workstation. It’s an asset with a defined lifecycle and financial value, and it’s used in the delivery of a service, so it’s a CI. Even so, it’s actually an Asset and a CI both rather than the terms being synonymous. Why? A Dell Inspiron will always be a Dell Inspiron from the day you order it until the day it’s disposed. During that time, it could actually be multiple different CIs….a Windows 10 End-user machine, a Linux Developer machine, etc, which are all entirely different configurations. Almost all physical CI’s are assets but not all physical assets are CI’s. For instance an IT asset to a company could be personnel; personnel would not usually be considered a CI, and therefore not tracked within a CMDB. By drawing this conclusion further we can extrapolate that a CMDB is a type of Asset Management but not all Asset Management utilizes a CMDB.

Asset management is a broader term and can often be defined as a catchall for IT inventory management. While a CMDB oversees the management of CI’s and the motivation for a CMDB lies in the services availability, and delivering great services, asset management deals with the overall financial liability of IT assets. Asset management is primarily more focused on a high level overview of the overall health and financial obligations of the IT assets of the business. CMDBs on the other hand are often integrated with change management systems and focus more on the nitty gritty of the ins and outs of the infrastructure to help with planned maintenance, EOL software cycles, disaster recovery, and more.

As an example: Company A has a strong ITAM system – it knows what it has, and it stops there. Let’s say an engineer gets paged at 2:00 AM about a system being down. They will have to spend an enormous amount of time figuring out relations, dependencies, impacted users, and vendors to call even though they have hardware and software asset data. 

Company B has a working CMDB system – it knows what it has, where it is and how it is all connected. In the same scenario as above when the engineer gets paged at 2:00 AM, they will save a lot of time (20% to 80%) knowing  interdependencies, SLAs, impacted users and vendors.