Discovering your environment

The first step in planning for configuration management is to understand what types of configuration items are present in your IT environment.

The process of identifying the configuration items in your environment is called discovery. You can import data that was discovered by other products and exported from those products in IDML files, or you can use a discovery tool, such as IBM® Tivoli® Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM), to find the items, identify their relationships, and list their attributes. You can view the discovered CIs in the TADDM user interface. Eventually, you will import CI data from TADDM into Control Desk, but you will not want to import all the discovered data.

The discovered CI data stored in TADDM follows the Common Data Model created by Tivoli. The Common Data Model defines types of CIs as well as their attributes and relationships. Familiarity with the Common Data Model will help you visualize the CIs in your environment and decide which CIs to manage. An HTML representation of the Common Data Model is included in the TADDM Software Developer's Kit (SDK), which is installed on the TADDM server. To learn about the Common Data Model and how to view it, refer to the TADDM SDK Guide.

You can also review the Common Data Model in the Deployer's Workbench. The classifications are presented in a tree view, and you can also use the Search function to locate classifications of interest.