The Value of the CDB to Other ITIL processes

Though the CDB is owned and maintained by the capacity manager, the available data is useful to other ITIL processes.

> Availability management must be able todetermine the causes of unacceptably slow performance. Unacceptably slow performance fora business service can have almost the same impact as if the service were unavailable. As such,availability management needs to understandand use the data reported on performance degradation.

> Configuration management requires a CMDB.Since the CDB is a subset of a CMDB, the data in the CDB stores resource and capacity usage information about configuration items in the CMDB. This linkage is key since information provided by capacity management is shared with other processes via the CMDB.

> Change management needs capacity informationto assess the “before and after” impact of changes on capacity. The CDB provides a "before" picture for any configuration changes or upgrades. Prior to making actual changes, the CDB is a reference source for determining the effects of these proposed changes. Once changes are made, the CDB also assists with monitoring results after the configuration change, to ensure it had the desired effect.

> Release management needs to plan and oversee hardware and software rollouts. Accessing data in the CDB prior to a rollout can help as certain whether there is adequate capacity for a successful rollout. On an ongoing basis, the CDB helps determine the distribution strategy, and the CDB data used in the post-distribution audit helps ensure the rollout was successful from a capacity standpoint.

> Service level management benefits from are liable source of performance data that can be used to set reasonable goals and to measure the achievement of those goals in production. The capacity manager works closely with the service level manager to define the SLAs. For all performance-related SLAs, the CDB becomes the database of record, tracking compliance with the agreements.

> Incident management needs to monitor data stored in the CDB to generate incidents when exceptions are noted. Incident management and capacity management are reciprocally related in that incident management tells capacity management about incidents related to capacity and performance, while capacity management resolves and documents capacity related incidents.

> Problem management needs the ability to review utilization and service data to quickly identify the root cause of performance problems. This data is needed both on a real-time and historical basis to see the current situation and the history building up to the event. The CDB is a key source of this data.

> Financial management needs to understand the chargeback algorithms, as well as the requirement to budget for additional hardware or software. The CDB maintains the resource usage data for total system and per-business service usage to generate costing and/or chargeback reports for end-user departments that are charged for their systems usage. Additionally, financial management often maintains the financial data within the CDB to provide based on the IT budget and financial plans.

> IT service continuity management utilizes the output of modeling, which can be found in the
CDB. This output can be valuable when the capacity manager models the impact of various
failures, disaster recovery, or business demand change scenarios. Too often, the capacity of the
failover configuration has not been assessed, leading to invalid configurations, and potentially
costly impacts on the business.