Configuration Management System (CMS)

A Configuration Management System (CMS) is a software tool that provides support for Configuration, Change and Release Management. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 emphasizes how organizations manage IT services within a company with a focus on service lifecycle rather than in process silos. As a result, the resulting work is service-centric instead of process-centric. Effective implementation requires strong integration of Configuration, Change, and Release Management.

Key Features and Benefits

The key features and benefits of CMS include the following:

• Identifies Customer Assets: Enables you to tack and manage physical and logical assets. These assets are identified within the CMS as Configuration Items (CIs). CIs can be further combined into CI Groups to aggregated identification.
• Manages Customer Assets: Enables you to search for CIs based on multi-criteria conditions, save search conditions, retrieve Level of Service (LOS) information for CIs associated with a detected event, and view customer level statistics associated with a CIs.
• Enables export to CSV or MS Excel format: You can export lists of configuration items (along with their properties) to CSV and MS Excel format to be fed into other systems or for later analysis. This provides flexibility in viewing configuration items and enables their use in external systems such as billing systems.
• Enables inventory views and management level summarized views: The CMS Browser page provides multiple customizable filtering options, as well as shows configuration item groups and a list of filtered results.
• Provides the required level of information: The CMS System Dashboard shows the hierarchy of configuration items, and users are able to drill down to the required level of information.