What's New in CMS Version 10.00

As part of the CMS system, Universal CMDB enables large enterprises and service providers to manage the configuration of their IT resources in a comprehensive and secure way while delivering value to end users and integrated applications.

Multi Tenancy

The UCMDB can now manage more than one tenant within a single UCMDB server, allowing service providers, and large or distributed organizations to implement total/partial segregation of managed resources for their end customers or their business units. The new multi-tenancy deployment mode is a flexible and powerful way to manage the data and the security for both shared and non-shared data.

User Permissions

The new security module makes it is easier and simpler to manage user permissions for different resources in UCMDB.

• The new concept of ‘resource group’ bundles together resources such as TQLs, views, reports, and correlation rules, enabling managing permissions for them as a single group.
• Enhanced user management allows defining user groups into hierarchies, assigning users to those groups, or mapping LDAP groups to user groups.
• User permissions can now also be applied to folders and not just for specific resources. UCMDB and Configuration Manager combine user management processes to define users and roles one time and leverage them across the solution.

UCMDB Browser

UCMDB browser allows easy access to data for both administrators and functional users and is now bundled within UCMDB. Its functionality is also embedded in the Configuration Manager user interface.

• Enabled by the new search engine in UCMDB, the browser provides powerful search capabilities and auto-completion for configuration items and services, enabling you to quickly find CIs as well as their relationships to other CIs.
• The browser now contains many new widgets including: security widget (integration with Enterprise View), automation widget (integration with Operation Orchestration),defects widget (integration with Application Lifecycle Management), monitoring widget (integration with Business Service Management), policies widget (integration with Configuration Manager), incident and change request widgets (integration with Service Manager), and more.
• The browser also allows updating data for specific CI types and configurable attributes.

New Search Engine

With the new & powerful search engine, you can search and find configuration items using a very intuitive approach. The new search does not require data preparation and works on internal and federated data.

• The search supports flexible queries that can span from one configuration item to a complex topology of related configuration items, giving you a simple way to find data within your UCMDB.
• The results of each search are ranked to ensure that the most important results appear at the top.
• Search queries support synonyms and enable scoping the search to a specific view, business service, or by cardinality to other configuration items.
• The search keywords can be configured by the UCMDB administrator, allowing maximum flexibility to customize the search.
• The search results are presented in the UCMDB Browser, thus giving you a rich and comprehensive view of the results via the different widgets.

Improved Topology Visualization

See the "big picture" of complex topology views within the IT universe by easily collapsing and expanding groups of CIs. The new CI grouping capabilities in the UCMDB user interface enables you to see the different layers or types of CIs with the ability to "zoom in and out" of particular blocks of the topology.

History Management Refactoring

The refactored CI history sub-system comes with improved capacity and performance, making it possible to keep history changes of configuration items for configurable durations and longer periods of time.

• Easier to track any change to configuration items as all configuration item attributes are now kept in the history sub-system.
• Even after a CI is deleted from UCMDB, you are able to view the CI as it was before deletion for auditing and other purposes.

UCMDB – Asset Manager integration

The new integration between UCMDB and AM allows for synching between the UCMDB and Asset Manager data. The integration is powerful, flexible and configurable, to fit the business needs of various customers.

Universal CMDB Configuration Manager delivers key functionality to improve your business continuity planning and help you gain value faster from your configuration management system.

Out-of-the-Box Cluster Resiliency and Data Quality Policies

Protect your ability to deliver services with Configuration Manager’s clustering analysis and policy enforcement.

• Leverage cluster resiliency policies upon installation to identify single points of failure within your environment and ensure that all clusters are symmetrical.
• Improve the quality of data you rely on with out-of-the-box data quality policies to ensure important CI attributes are not missing in the Universal CMDB.
• These policies are provided as part of the new Advanced Configuration Manager module.

Similarity Policies

Ensure configurations are alike among clusters or groups of CIs. Save tremendous time by defining a similarity policy to ensure servers, for example, are similar to each other, without having to define the specific attribute values. This is especially important in highly dynamic environments.

• Leverage similarity policies in clusters to ensure the CIs within those clusters are similar. A single policy can be defined and leveraged across many clusters, and every CI will be compared only with other CIs of the same cluster.
• These policies are provided as part of the new Advanced Configuration Manager module.

Similarity Policy Creation

Configuration Manager walks you through the few steps needed to create and enforce a similarity policy with ease. Start enforcing standardized configurations with minimal effort, and rapidly obtain value from the configuration management system.

Policy Categorization

To gain focused insight into policy breaches, policies can be categorized to focus on a subset of policies at a time. For example, view all the policies related to ensuring geographic redundancy, or related to improving data quality. In addition, the categorized policy statuses can be consumed using the UCMDB API and populated into any reporting system.

New User Experience

Configuration Manager’s Home page has been revamped to provide you guidance on how to begin your configuration management activities and help you achieve insights faster, and menu options and modules have been reorganized.

• Statistics tab enables you to view policy breaches and other key performance indicators.
• Use the Explorer tab to easily browse for CIs or navigate topologies.
• Select the Changes tab to understand which CIs have encountered changes and need authorizations.
• From the Home page, you can create a view or policy.

Search and Explore Capability with UCMDB Browser

Configuration Manager now delivers easier information retrieval, topological navigation, viewing, and analysis from one user interface. UCMDB Browser capabilities are available directly from Configuration Manager to enable seamless viewing and analysis of the data residing in the configuration management system.

View Creation

Configuration Manager now includes the ability to create an inventory view in very few steps, without the need to perform this work directly in UCMDB. Configuration Manager takes care of the view creation in UCMDB behind the scenes, simplifying the workload of the administrator.

Combined User Management

As part of simplifying administration, UCMDB and Configuration Manager combine user management processes to enable you to define your users and roles one time and leverage them across the solution.

Universal Discovery (UD) is a comprehensive solution with a foundation that is based on the UCMDB/Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced Edition (DDMA) architecture. UD unifies agent, agentless and passive technologies to provide end-to-end IT visibility through a single product deployment to support inventory and data center discovery. The new unified discovery engine allows customers to easily gather detailed CI information for specific servers and the applications running on them, as well as inventory and software utilization information, providing an accurate picture of your IT environment, including mainframe and virtual systems. Universal Discovery is committed to improving administrative capabilities, creating efficiencies, and reducing costs.

Hybrid Discovery

In an effort to simplify administration, Universal Discovery uses a single user interface and data repository to support agent, agentless, and passive discovery of assets to provide detailed configuration information.

• Universal Discovery employs a unique technology that provides you with complete visibility of all assets on the network, physical or virtual.
• Passive discovery feature is like having a set of ears on the network, automatically identifying new IPs and creating events so you can take appropriate action using either the agent or agentless technology to further discover the attributes of the new device.
• The data is available as part of the UCMDB to give you visibility and control over the real state of your infrastructure.

Passive Just-in-Time Discovery

Universal Discovery integrates with the HP Real User Monitor to continuously sense network traffic in real time, allowing for the capture of non-durable connections as well as durable connections.

• The passive discovery approach avoids affecting the network operations and can still provide a comprehensive picture of the network’s durable and non-durable connections.
• Allows constant awareness of ever-changing networks and helps you to remain in control by identifying new devices on the network that may not have been found with current agentless technologies.
• Real User Monitor (RUM) version 9.20 is used as the passive discovery probe to complement passive discovery capabilities.
• Universal Discovery integrates with the RUM engine, acting as the UD passive discovery probe, which is plugged into a data-center router/switch.
• The passive probe captures information through a SPAN (or mirror) port or a network tap to provide just in time discovery functionality.
• Administration and management of the passive probe integration is done through Universal Discovery’s user interface, providing one UI to perform administration tasks for all of UD’s functions and features.

Management Zone-based Discovery

The new Discovery Management concept provides the capability to create defined zones in the user interface for a region of the infrastructure within the organization. For example, users can define Data-Center X as a Management Zone when they need to either discover all windows machines of DC-X every week using the same discovery parameters, or discover all J2EE servers of DC-X every day using those same discovery parameters.

Discovery Troubleshooter

Gaining insight into the health of one or more discovery activities just got a lot easier. Universal Discovery now provides a discovery troubleshooter that can be launched to troubleshoot activities. The troubleshooter can also troubleshoot missing Nodes, NodeElements and RunningSoftware using Software Identification Rules.

Universal Discovery Agent

Universal Discovery's agent technology was formerly the Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory (DDMI) agent. UD continues to support the breadth and depth of the renowned DDMI Scanner with extended inventory discovery capabilities providing users with a significant improvement in the recognition of both hardware and installed software.

The following features enhance the deployment and extend the capabilities of the UD agent:

• Native Agent Packaging. Using the native package manager, Universal Discovery Agents for UNIX platforms can now be packaged into the native OS package format, which then allows the agents to be installed/uninstalled on remote hosts around the world in an automated fashion with no manual intervention.
• New Shell Protocol Capabilities.To simplify the deployment and management of credentials, Universal Discovery now provides a new shell protocol which allows agentless discovery patterns to be executed similar to using SSH/NTCMD on end points that have Universal Discovery agents installed on them.

Discovery Rule-based Enrichment and Normalization

As part of integrating the DDMI product into Universal Discovery, enrichment and normalization rules from DDMI are now available for all of the adapters in Universal Discovery.

• The rules are used to enrich the data and improve the data's quality.
• You can also add user-defined rules.

Scanner-based Inventory

Scanner-based inventory discovery provides a wide range of hardware and configuration-related information as well as normalized installed software information suitable for software asset management purposes.

• Software utilization can be collected, enabling IT administrators to determine the software applications that are installed, but not used.
• In addition to the data center, client devices, such as laptops and desktops can also be discovered and inventoried.
• Improved scalability means a single probe can inventory up to 50,000 computers.

Secure Data Flow for Federation/Push over Probe

Federation and push adapters now run over the data flow probe.

• Leverages the already secured channels of communication between the probe and the UCMDB server.
• Eliminates the need to separately configure communication channels over firewalls for each integration.
• Any performance or memory issues caused by an integration affect only the probe and not the UCMDB server.
• For users wanting to perform federation, push, and population jobs without installing a probe, the new integration service can be used for these purposes.

UCMDB Discovery and Integration Content Guide

The Content Pack documentation is now provided as an online help system, including reference information for discovery jobs and integrations, as well as infrastructure and inventory activities. Many areas of the discovery interface, including wizards and adapters, link directly to the help information for that topic using the Help > Help on this page menu option.

Deployment Guide

The UCMDB Deployment Guide combines the UCMDB and Configuration Management deployments and is now an interactive HTML document providing only the information relevant to the selections you make for your deployment.

Help Center Home Page

The Help Center home page provides a new look and feel to the online help with a landing page including many useful links and resources.