this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Hi, I can't seem to find if there's a consensus on this so asking here.

Not all CIs are assets and not all assets are CIs. But many assets and CIs are the same physical or virtual thing.

I see some vendors (e.g. ServiceNow, Freshservice) have separate asset databases and CMDBs. and other (e.g. Jira Service Management) have a combined database.

Do you have any preference one way or the other? Are there pros and cons to do it a certain way? To me it seems like maintaining two databases is more fiddly and time consuming but I don't know.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Personally, I prefer that it's all in one place. It's hard enough to get teams to update any sort of asset inventory in one place. Getting them to update it in two, and keep everything in sync, sounds like a disaster begging to happen. And, as a heavy consumer of my organization's CMDB (I work in cybersecurity), I much prefer having only one place to look.

The most successful CMDB I've ever seen was a single, unified asset tracking system which included all relevant asset details, asset owner, technical PoC and compliance documentation. The reason it was so successful was that NAC was tied to the CMDB. If a system wasn't in the CMDB, it got dumped in a very locked down VLAN which was really only useful for new system setup. Once a system was configured, the appropriate paperwork submitted, and the system added to the CMDB, it would then be automagically moved to the appropriate VLAN for it's location/function. When a system owner or technical PoC left the organization, one of the required workflows was reassigning all assets in the CMDB. This all worked surprisingly, especially considering that the CMDB was a bespoke Classic ASP website written in VB6, with some newer pages being VB.Net in C#.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

This is cool, thank you for sharing. Especially interesting to hear about what made that CMDB so successful too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Typically I've found it better to be combined both for process integration and ease of administration like you said.

It can make sense to separate it but it totally depends on the company.

I also think it's always easier to start with everything in the cmdb and separate things later if it makes sense to do so vs the other way around.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks for sharing. And agree, never thought about needing to separate them out later but definitely easier to split rather than combine