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# Three Common Reasons why Your CMDB Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It)
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If you’re experiencing difficulties like your auto-discovery being unable to find resources that you *know* are there, or being unable to register new CIs, you might be tearing out your hair. Based on our experience with other CMDB customers, here are three of the most common reasons why your CMDB isn’t working – and how to fix them.
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## **1. Issues with Auto-Discovery**
One of the most common issues we hear about is that something happened with auto-discovery. For example, you might find that a server name has changed unexpectedly, that multiple IP addresses have been assigned to a single device, or that a server has mysteriously duplicated.
In Device42, every object – including servers, subnets, IP addresses, and applications – has an associated audit history. One view will show you whether an object was last added or updated by a user or a D42 process. If it was a user who last updated the device, then it may simply be that the user was the one who accidentally added the wrong name or a duplicate attribute.
You can also see whether an object was updated via an auto-cleaning process designed to neaten or de-duplicate your registry of assets. If the device was last updated by this or by the auto-discovery feature, it may be that you need to fine-tune your settings. Fortunately, you can drill into the audit history to find the exact job that completed a faulty update, allowing you to adjust your configuration.
## **2. Difficulty in Running Discovery on Azure**
We’re not about to get involved in the Azure vs. AWS debate, but some users have found a little more difficulty . Here’s a little more detail.
1. Have your subscription ID ready, which can be found in the Azure portal.
2. Create Device42 as an application in Azure by creating a new registration in the App Registrations panel and then following the steps in the .
3. Gather your Client ID and Tenant ID using azure Active Directory, then create a new application secret from the Certificates & secrets menu.
4. You need to provide Device42 with a reader role. This gives the application the ability to view your entire Azure deployment. From the Subscriptions pane in the Azure portal, select your subscription, navigate to the Access Control tab, select Add role assignment, and then assign the Reader role. With this, you’re all set, and you should be able to run discovery.
Alternatively, you can simply . This can be as simple as loading the appliance into a virtual machine and then setting a few commands via Azure Shell.
## **3. Can’t Add Multiple Devices to the Same Rack Unit**
We tend to assume that one rack holds one device – but what if that’s not the case? A single rack unit might fit multiple miniaturized appliances, IoT sensors, or blade servers. If you want an accurate diagram of your server room or data center, your CMDB needs to accommodate these situations.
In Device42, you can do this by first creating a new hardware model. Here, the Width Ratio is the setting you want to look out for. If you can fit three devices in a single rack, then you want to set the Width Ratio to 1/3. If you can fit four in, then the ratio is 1/4.
Identifying the position for each device will be a bit trickier. The default position value for a device in a rack is 2520. If there are three devices in a rack, then you’ll need to divide this number by three – 2520/3 = 840. This means that you need to position your devices in increments of 840, starting from zero. Position zero will represent the device on the left, position 840 will represent the middle device, and position 1680 (0 + 840 + 840) will represent the device on the right.
Lastly, you can mount these devices by going to the rack page and then placing the position values you just calculated in “Devices in this rack.” Afterwards, you’ll be able to see them displayed on the rack layout page.
### **Make Your CMDB Work for You with Device42**
Here at Device42, we’re fully invested in providing each of our users with a support experience that goes above and beyond. If you have an issue that you can’t solve with our knowledge base, we’ll get on the phone with you and give you whatever you need, including custom solutions and integrations for your unique environment. If you’d like to experience how fast and easy It is to get started with Device42, feel free to  today!
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# DevOps and the CMDB
IT teams face some of the biggest challenges yet in managing complex, hybrid technology for business. Mixed groups of infrastructure, operations, development, cloud and business stakeholders are charged with working together to turn more data into actionable insights, improve service delivery and reduce costs. On top of these challenges, different teams manage different silos of technology using different models for success.
 (Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis) explains that many IT leaders mistakenly believe that DevOps and ITIL are incompatible. In his more recent book, The Unicorn Project, Kim explains how the “three ways” of DevOps—flow, feedback and continual learning—work in successful DevOps implementations. All these approaches require the same detailed critical information about the infrastructure landscape of an enterprise that ITIL practitioners would call a configuration management database (CMDB).
It’s impossible to scale even the most agile DevOps environments without having this data, but CMDBs have proven to be a big challenge. In recent research, Charles Betz and Rich Lane of Forrester explain that “For a capability that some call a best practicum, the CMDB is awfully hard to get right.”
Here’s the problem: how do IT leaders get the full insight into their IT infrastructure and applications dependencies they need before, during and after making improvements? How can they find undocumented resources that may hold the keys to streamlining and transforming the environment?
Many organizations use a combination of spreadsheets and manual effort–with mixed results. This model doesn’t fit very well into agile DevOps teams, either. The real answer to this question comes through comprehensive automatic discovery and asset management.
**Using the Right Technology to Turn Complexity into Simplicity**
Betz and Lane point out that “CMDB versus cloud is a false dichotomy…Planning, accounting/reporting, and coordinating don’t go away just because of cloud or DevOps. The real choice is how enterprises will integrate the two.”
The right technology bridges this gap. With minimal knowledge at the start, IT infrastructure and operations teams can use automatic and agentless discovery to map out infrastructure and application resources and dependencies across cloud and on-premises data centers. The best tools also offer insight into detailed data center floor and rack diagrams and power consumption. They can also automatically feed data into ITSM ticketing systems to drive automated provisioning. Systems and processes will vary by organization. The important thing is that the right data get to the right application.
Device42 provides automated visibility into the entire enterprise required to manage complex data centers. It also provides a pre-configured CMDB. Whether you choose to call it a CMDB or an IT asset library, it still fulfills the same function..
In one of our implementations, we worked with an award-winning creator and worldwide publisher of interactive entertainment, including video games, to create and support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). The organization has a large and complex enterprise which includes on-premises data centers and cloud resources. Their enterprise includes 16 storage arrays and resources in Google, AWS and Azure clouds, as well as hundreds of VMWare instances.
IT leaders needed detailed, accurate data to support DevOps via Ansible-driven CI/CD.
The Network Team Lead explains: “We brought in a DevOps expert to lead our efforts. He told us we needed a single source of truth. We showed him what we could discover with Device42 and he said that it would work perfectly for what we need.”
“We used its tagging and IP asset management (IPAM) capabilities to build out Ansible groups and discover everything securely. Going forward, we plan on standardizing on Device42 for our single source of truth across all our IT teams.”
**Creating Strategic Data Centers with a CMDB**
Device42 also worked with a financial services firm known as . TP ICAP has a substantial investment in analytics—an ideal DevOps use-case—in which they provide proprietary pricing information based on historical data and execution functionality.
When the opportunity emerged to consolidate into two data centers, TP ICAP began looking at ways to streamline their operations. They wanted to explore cloud options, reduce their overall footprint, discard obsolete hardware, and increase their overall agility.
Achieving these objectives meant laying a substantial amount of groundwork to map the existing data center implementation. They needed to find their obsolete infrastructure before they could consolidate it, for example, and they needed to find application and infrastructure dependencies before they could migrate.
With Device42, TP ICAP reduced their planning time and overall effort by over 25%. By adding a visualization tool, they were able to quickly identify obsolete servers, servers without a primary application or function, consolidate underutilized infrastructure, and separate internal and external dataflows. In the future, they plan to use this technology to build on the foundations of their strong CMDB to create faster and more responsive applications based on network flow data and running processes.
**Device42 Brings Collaborative Improvement to the Data Center and Cloud**
The promise of DevOps consists of fast, responsive infrastructure that can be invoked as code. The reality of getting there requires a way to capture and document detailed data on infrastructure and applications that may not even be known at the start of the project. Gap analysis demands detailed understanding of the current state to improve it. Modernization and optimization efforts target obsolete and uncategorized infrastructure, but these items can’t be found easily through manual effort. Of course, you can’t do infrastructure as code if you don’t know what infrastructure exists at the start.
That’s where automated discovery comes in. Device42 provides a complete, real-time picture of infrastructure assets and shows how they work together. The data it  provides is easily shared in analytics and ITSM tools. It breaks down silos and unites disparate teams because everyone has access to the same view of how things work. In short, Device42 provides a map that everyone can use to improve together. It’s the very important “you are here” indicator on your roadmap to the future. See it for yourself. !
# Continuous Compliance – the Newest Member of DevOps Pipeline
Audits are expensive. Take a HIPAA audit, for example. The cheapest kind of HIPAA audit is a gap assessment, which only is meant to identify ways in which a company might fail to fully meet HIPAA requirements. For this audit, an auditor might not even make an on-site visit to the company. Estimated cost? Up to $30,000—and a full HITRUST assessment might cost up to $120,000.
Similarly, a PCI-DSS audit might cost —and a substantial minority of companies pay over half a million dollars every year. Software licensing audits can cost tens of thousands of dollars. In short, there are many kinds of audits that companies must regularly go through, they are all expensive—and they are all out-of-date as soon as they’re completed.
If you’re a DevOps organization, then you might be deploying software as often as . If your audit starts with a snapshot of your product that’s taken at nine in the morning, it could be obsolete twice over by lunchtime.
## Companies Need New Ways to Handle the Audit Process
To be clear, we’re not discounting the worth of a comprehensive audit process. Your organization has ways to manage and control access to data that exist outside of the development process, and these methods should be scrutinized on a regular basis. While reckless software development definitely has the potential to expose personal data, the most common form of HIPAA breach (for example) occurs when untrained employees s.
On the other hand, software development can potentially expose personal data to individuals who aren’t supposed to access it—for example by making large cloud volumes full of PHI available to the public internet without a password. Traditional audits won’t catch this, however, because these compliance failures are ephemeral. Even if potential compliance breaches are here today and gone tomorrow, however, they’re still exploitable while they exist.
Just as DevOps professionals constantly test their code to make sure that bugs don’t make it into production, they should also put safeguards in place to make sure that they don’t ship compliance violations either.
## Weaving Continuous Compliance into CI/CD
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) represents one of the best ways for DevOps teams to add compliance to their development practices.
As part of CI/CD, team members strive to increase the frequency of their deployments in order to match a high cadence. In order to do this, they focus heavily on automation—automatically building new releases and testing new deployments to eliminate integration errors. The focus on integration lends itself naturally to continuous deployment, allowing teams to automatically package and deploy their new releases.
CI/CD relies on both software-defined lifecycles and software-defined deployments, promoting high levels of automation at low cost. What if we used software to define compliance as well?
A lot of compliance can be boiled down to binary questions. Is this file password-protected? Yes or no? Can employee X access database Y? Yes or no? Will administrator Z be notified if this file is changed or removed? Yes or no?
By reducing questions of compliance into binaries, they can be tested in a reliable, repeatable, and automated manner. In keeping with CI/CD philosophy, developers can use automation to test compliance at every point in the software development life cycles. That is to say, you may be able to test for compliance every time your developer hits “save” in their text editor, every time your developers submit a pull request, every time your commits are staged for deployment, and even once the software is running in production.
## Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Compliance
In short, by automating continuous compliance, we can expand CI/CD into CI/CD/CC. This can help developers avoid much of the necessity for static, point-in-time audits that become obsolete as soon as they’re started. Instead, they can maintain compliance with major governance regimes, adhere to security best practices, avoid fines due to software licensing irregularities, and more—all without subjecting themselves to the large amounts of time and expense that traditional audit processes entail. Automating compliance won’t just result in software that checks an audit box—it will be safer, more secure, and of higher quality at the end of the day.
For information about how Device42 can help support your continuous compliance efforts,  today for a free demo.