Implementing ITIL Configuration Management

CHAPTER 9. Populating the Configuration Management Database

When most organizations first begin thinking about configuration management, their top concern is putting data into a database. Hopefully by now you realize this shouldn’t be your first concern, but data population is still a critical topic. This chapter provides the details on how to execute the data population plan you created in Chapter 5, “Planning for Data Population.”

You can use two different approaches to populate a Configuration Management Database (CMDB): a waterfall or a trickle. The waterfall approach is to gather as much data as possible from throughout the environment and then integrate that data to assemble a complete configuration management picture. This approach could ...