Patent ID: 7756828

Claim:
One or more computer readable volatile or nonvolatile computer readable media storing a configuration management database (CMDB) for storing configuration information about an Information Technology (IT) system, the configuration management database comprising: configuration items that correspond to and represent actual configuration items in the Information Technology (IT) system, indicia of relations between the configuration items, and attributes of the configuration items; configuration states of the configuration items, the configuration states comprising: approval-pending future states of configuration items, which indicate that respective configuration items have changes for which approval has been requested and the changes have not yet been approved or rejected; historical approval-pending past states of configuration items, which correspond to or comprise rejected approval-pending future states of the configuration items; approved-planned future states of configuration items, which correspond to or comprise approval-pending future states that have been approved for deployment; desired current states of configuration items, which correspond to or comprise approved-planned future states that have been implemented by releases to the Information Technology (IT) system, and which indicate states that corresponding configuration items should currently have; historical desired states of configuration items, the historical desired states corresponding to or comprising previous desired current states that are no longer in effect and have been superseded by more recent desired current states; actual current states of configuration items, the actual current states comprising states of the configuration items derived from automated inventorying various of the actual configuration items that correspond to and are represented by the configuration items having the actual current states, the actual current states comprising new desired current states wherein a given configuration item concurrently has both an actual current state and desired current state concurrently and mutually reflecting different state of the given configuration item; and historical actual states of configuration items, the historical actual states of configuration items comprising or corresponding to previous actual current states of the configuration items that have been superseded by more recent actual current states.