4. Status Accounting

Status accounting for CIs refers to the ability to record and report on the status of all CIs that are under control of the Configuration Management System (CMS).

Any activity performed on the CI from creation to disposal is recorded, providing an audit trail throughout its life cycle. Records are marked with the activity date and ID of the individual who performed the action. This means that you can see who updated items, performed transitions, or added relationships to a particular item, and when these transactions occurred.

Status information is used for successful audits by the Configuration Management team, which needs to see the current status of CIs. Service Manager provides many default reports that the Service Management team can use to find the status of CIs. In addition, custom reports can easily be created to display required information.

Status information could also be needed by other service management processes, such as Change Management and Problem Management, to relate new RFCs, problems, and workarounds to particular CIs. Other Service Manager processes link directly to the Configuration Management application, enabling you to find CI information from within the context of the other process. For example, the Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management processes require you to choose a CI to relate to the new issue. This can be done directly from the form using the relational field search box.

SBM reports are important for keeping up-to-date on your configuration status. Status reports that include the following should be produced on a regular basis:

Lists of all CIs under control, their current version, and change history
Status accounting reports on the current, previous, and planned states
Unique identifiers of constituent CIs and their current status
Configuration baselines, releases, and their status
Latest software item versions and their status for a system baseline
Persons responsible for making status changes
Change history and audit trail
Open Problems and RFCs

Status accounting reports can be used to establish system baselines and to trace changes between baselines and releases. Status reports could include:

Baseline and release identifiers
Latest software versions associated with each build
The number of changes for a system
The number of baselines and releases
The usage and volatility of CIs
Comparisons of baselines and releases

In addition to reports, notifications can be created to inform IT staff about CI changes. SBM enables users to subscribe to notifications for changes to a CI, such as a state transition or an update. Service Manager comes with default notifications. Additional notifications can be created and configured using SBM Application Administrator. For example, you may be responsible for your production servers, and you want to be notified whenever a CI item related to servers is updated. Your administrator can create a notification that looks for certain conditions, such as updates on items related to production servers, and then sends an e-mail notification when the event occurs. Users can subscribe to any notification to which they have access by configuring the notifications in their User Profile in Serena Work Center.