One strategy for managing increasing organizational complexity is the adoption of the IT infrastructure library (ITIL), a framework of best practices that aligns IT services with business needs. Configuration management databases (CMDBs) like the solution offered by ServiceNow are the key to implementing ITIL-based management. If you don’t know what components make up your environment — and how all of those assets relate to one another — how can you monitor, manage and support them?

Zenoss can poll the CMDB for information about devices and components — adding devices to be monitored, if necessary, and linking those items with their counterparts in the CMDB. This eliminates operator cycles spent on populating the monitoring system with information from the CMDB. Additionally, this allows Zenoss to create incidents linked to configuration items in the CMDB — giving IT teams continuously up-to-date, accurate and actionable information on the service issues they are working to resolve.