A CMS may contain various IT management applications and databases, such as the CMDB, asset database, and a change database management system.

The Single Point of Contact

The CMDB offers a single point of contact, making it the decisive reference mechanism for all IT processes by offering business oriented visibility into the dependences among business processes, customers, tools, and supporting IT organization. This increases the response level for support staffs of the status of real-time IT services, such as e-mail accessibility, Web site functionality, and so on.

The top CMDB solutions are all created to support an associated CMDB approach, meaning that not all configuration data must be present in a particular physical database. As an alternative, the primary databases, and data sources remains the dependable source for data, while the CMDB serves as the reference for where this data lives and how to fetch it. ITIL V3 now identifies the significance of this coalesced approach and endorses that it be a basic part of the infrastructure of a CMS.

With coalition approach, basic information is stored in the CMDB, which is mapped to other, more comprehensive data repositories. This mapping provides a CMDB the right to use all configuration items (CIs). So, the CMS contains the CMDB or multiple CMDBs, and with the help of association, access to all key data stores and their corresponding contents. By adding important functions, such as asset management, dashboards, analytics, the CMS propagates the value of the CMDB across IT.