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What a stale CMDB costs
Your CMDB health score says the record is complete. It does not say the record is true. This guide shows you how to find the gap between your CMDB and your physical estate, and what that gap costs each team that relies on it.
Free PDF, about 14 pages. Written for data centre, facilities, IT asset, change, finance and sustainability teams.
What a stale CMDB costs
Martin Docherty, DCIS®
The record does not fail. It drifts.
Servers are moved during emergency maintenance windows. Feeds are swapped. Cards are replaced. Equipment is decommissioned and never taken off the record. Discovery tools keep the logical estate up to date. Almost nothing keeps the physical estate up to date.
So the CMDB becomes a little less accurate every day, and the dashboards stay green, because completeness only asks whether a field is filled in, not whether it is true.
The cost does not land on whoever runs the CMDB. It lands on everyone else.
What you will get from this guide
Why your health score will not warn you. The difference between a complete record, a correct record and an accurate one, and why only one of them catches a server that moved.
The cost, desk by desk. What drift costs operations, facilities, capacity planning, change, security, finance, commercial, risk and sustainability teams, for enterprise and colocation estates.
Two tests you can run this week. The ten-jobs test gives you a capture rate. The one-asset test tells you whether you can prove what happened to a critical asset over the last twelve months.
A cost-of-drift worksheet. Bring together costs that are normally scattered across ten budgets, so the problem finally has a number and an owner.
A "what good looks like" checklist. A vendor-neutral list of the properties a physical estate record needs before you can trust it, or let AI act on it.
Written for the people who rely on the CMDB but do not own it
- Data centre and facilities managers
- Capacity planners and white space planners
- Change managers and CAB members
- IT asset and configuration managers
- Finance, procurement and billing leads
- Sustainability and ESG reporting teams
It covers enterprise, colocation and telecoms estates.
“It is not that the CMDB has failed. It is that the physical information feeding it can no longer be trusted.”
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