Assimilation CMDB is the foundation of the Assimilation System Management Suite. It provides a discovery process and comprehensive extensible, always up-to-date database for understanding your systems, services, networks and security. Below you’ll find both the current set of CMDB features and those from our roadmap. All other Assimilation components are based on top of the Assimilation CMDB, and all integrate closely with it. This page lists all the CMDB features.
CMDB Features
| Feature | Description |
| Always up to date | Changes in systems and configurations are discovered in seconds, with updates occurring immediately. There is no manual CMDB data entry to be out of date. Acts as single source of truth for your IT infrastructure – uniting your server, network and security teams in one view. |
| Extensible | Assim-CMDB is easily extensible by System Administrators to discover nearly anything by writing scripts that output JSON. |
| Scalable | Our unique reliable no-news-is-good-news (RNNIGN) protocol allows us to scale like no other product – without significant central resource growth. This protocol was specifically designed to efficiently support management of huge numbers of endpoints. |
| Near-zero configuration | In the worst case, the location and public key of the central server has to be provided to the agents. In the best case, only its public key. Nanoprobes (agents) have no other configuration. |
| Secure communications | RNNIGN communications is encrypted using state-of-the-art elliptic curve public key encryption. |
| Agent-based architecture | Our low-profile agent-based (nanoprobe) architecture and RNNIGN protocol allows us to efficiently delegate work to the systems being managed resulting in unparalleled scalability. |
| Minimal network traffic | Network traffic is minimized by our RNNIGN protocol. Only changes need to be sent to the central server complex, eliminating the central server network and resource bottleneck. |
| Cannot set off net security alarms | All discovery takes place locally, with no packets sent on the network, except to forward results to the CMDB using our RNNIGN protocol. |
| Service dependencies | We discover the dependencies between client processes and server processes, allowing for answering of questions like what all services are part of this business process and providing an overview of how the services interact from a high level. |
| Virtual / cloud support | Our discovery software runs in virtual and cloud machines. Some features not available in these environments. |
| Graph Database | We store all CMDB data in the industry-leading Neo4J graph database which provides the Cypher high-level graph query language. The graph database permits us to easily answer questions which are difficult at best with other CMDBs. Many interesting questions about IT infrastructure are graph-based. For example: “What all services depend directly or indirectly upon this system?“. |
| System IP and NIC configuration | We discover all interfaces, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and details of interface settings including duplex and MTU settings on systems with agents. |
| No promiscuous mode | Our discovery techniques do not require promiscuous mode on Linux. We do not listen to packets which do not belong to us. No packet sniffing or traffic analysis is involved. |
| LLDP Discovery | Our receive-only implementation of the IEEE 802.1AB (LLDP) protocol allows us non-invasive discovery of details of switch configuration of host-connected switch ports including VLAN, duplex and MTU settings.[1] |
| CDP Discovery | Our receive-only implementation of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) allows us non-invasive discovery of details of Cisco switch configuration of host-connected switch ports including VLAN, duplex and MTU settings.[1] |
| Switch connections | We discover connections between real server NICs and switch port NICs, providing an accurate and up-to-date map of server switch connections. [1] |
| IP address discovery | We discover all active IPv4 addresses on our subnets without pings or other packet transmission. A device only needs to be active on the network for seconds for us to discover it.[2] |
| MAC address discovery | We discover all active MAC addresses on our subnets without pings or other packet transmission. A device only needs to be active on the network for seconds for us to discover it.[2] |
| Command line reports | We provide a variety of canned reports from the command line. New canned reports are easily added with basic knowledge of Cypher. This interface is ideal for interfacing with a ChatOps chat bot. |
| REST query API | We provide a JSON-based REST interface to all our canned queries (shared with the command line). |
| Event API | We provide an event API to provide notifications of changes to discovered objects and statuses. |
| Service discovery | We discover all services being offered by our systems, including details of the ports, commands, command line arguments, etc. |
| System configuration discovery | We discover a wide variety of system configuration details – including things like available commands, and versions of packages installed. |
| Notes | |
| [1] | Not usually available in virtual machines, including clouds. |
| [2] | Not usually available to cloud-hosted agents. |
Roadmap CMDB Features
| Roadmap Feature | Description |
| Visualization | Our graph database creates unlimited opportunities for insightful visualization of the interactions and dependencies between servers, services and switches in your network. |
| OS support | Add support for operating systems beyond Linux. FreeBSD and Windows come to mind. |
| NAT support | Provide support for managing systems behind NAT firewalls. First would likely be nanoprobe-equipped Linux NAT boxes with. Hardware firewalls would be futher down the line. |
See A Demo
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Watch A Video
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