Many organizations are striving to base IT management on a CMDB (Configuration Management Database). A CMDB contains data describing managed resources like computer systems and application software, process artifacts like incident, problem and change records, and the relationships among these entities. The data may include authorized configuration baselines or snapshots of the current state of the IT environment. The contents of the CMDB are often managed by a service asset and configuration management process, and serve as a foundation and integration point for other IT management processes, such as change management and availability management.

A CMDB may be part of a configuration management system. It may integrate other management data repositories (MDRs), including other CMDBs. The usefulness of a CMDB is dependent on the quality, reliability and security of the data organized through the CMDB. In practice this goal is challenging because the management data are stored in MDRs that use different data models and that support different access interfaces. Examples of potential MDRs include CIMOMs, vendor tools, and customer in-house data stores.

A solution that assumes the conversion of all data to a single data model or consolidation of all data in a single repository is neither practical nor desirable. What is needed is a solution to federate heterogeneous MDRs, including linking together all the data about an IT resource, even when the data for a resource may be dispersed across multiple MDRs. IT resources include configuration items (e.g., computers, software, services, buildings), process artifacts (e.g., incident records and request for change forms), and relationships between them. Each resource, including relationships, may have a separately managed lifecycle and its state may be represented by a set of properties.