References and case studies

Hedmark IKT is an IT company in Norway, owned by 7 municipalities with a combined population of about 100,000 people. In addition to being an IT partner for these municipalities, approximately 30 other public companies use our services, including cinemas, waterworks and fire departments.

About 20,000 people in more than 260 different physical locations use our solutions, including health personnel, teachers, students and municipal administration. Hedmark IKT has about 40 employees in two offices with one datacenter.

Up until 2016 we primarily used Excel documents to keep track of our assets, like subnets and IP addresses, servers, databases, switches and wireless access points. Suffice to say, this was cumbersome, inefficient and insecure. We started looking for other solutions and tested CMDBuild, among other solutions. CMDBuild did a great impression as it was Open Source and highly extensible, and we could build our own data model to fit our needs. Furthermore, we could import data from Excel documents into CMDBuild with very little effort.

We already had a decent ticketing system, so we decided to build our own model with just servers, subnets and IP addresses. Later we added switches, routers, printers and firewalls, server operating system, switch operating system, systems, databases and businesses, all connected together, searchable and easy to maintain. With some planning, this agile, evolutionary approach is achievable with CMDBuild.

Compared to CMDBuild READY2USE this is a very simple data model, but it serves our purpose and helps a lot.

A more recent addition to the data model is DHCP scopes and options. Using CMDBuild and some automation scripts, we configure our DHCP server scopes just using CMDBuild. Our next step is to automate monitoring setup using CMDBuilds API and Nagios.

We look forward to upgrade to CMDBuild 3, and see some long-awaited features that we will take advantage of, especially triggers and improved UI performance.

CMDBuild DAY 2020 presentation

You can also have a look at the speech done by Audun Wangen at the CMDBuild DAY 2020 event.