CIM for CMDB?

Hello dear list readers,

I am new on this list and am searching for some advice. The mailing list 
is probably not exactly the right place to ask the following but I hope 
I may get some advice or some pointers where to go from here and read 
further on.

The systems department of the data center at the university where I work 
strives to introduce a holistic monitoring system. Every service and 
it's components - be it physical or logical - as well as the 
relationship to other services and their components shall be recorded, 
changes tracked and the whole thing beeing visualised. The aim is to 
have a tool or a solution that allows to enter and edit the relevant 
data, as well as to show a recent map of the dependencies between those 
items. With ITIL part of this called a CMDB, I would say it's a database 
with a frontend to enter and view your stuff and certain amount of 
interfaces allowing you to update the changes that are being done in 
your infrastructure.
Later on, we want to connect this CMDB to a monitoring software such as 
Nagios or Shinken.

As far as I have searched and read docs about this topic the Common 
Information Model (CIM) should be a great data model to describe the CIs 
and their relations and eventually save them to a database. But I 
haven't found such a solution, yet. At least none that is based on an 
open source License and is using CIM as the data model in the database.

Do you know of any CMDB that uses CIM as the database schema? This 
relates to Relational DBs but maybe there are other products that solve 
this with a NoSQL DB or an object oriented DB respectively.

In the beginning of this project, I thought I could just start by 
describing e.g. a mail server infrastructure with a self invented XML 
derivative. As I was hacking the first lines, I felt like reinventing 
the wheel and thus googled around searching for XML Schema files that 
already describe the base for what I was doing.
That's how I came to CIM. I downloaded all XSD files of CIM and skimmed 
over them. Overwhelmed by the mass of stuff, I scratched my head and 
found my self lost.

I also skimmed through the CIM tutorial. It is some kind of explanatory 
but I find it not to be not much like a real tutorial. Probably I 
missunderstood the whole thing somehow. But I thought that if I read it, 
I would not only get a basic understanding of CIM but also see and learn 
some examples so I could continue writing my own XML files using 
conforming to CIM.

The CIM Tool (http://wiki.cimtool.org/index.html) seems coming close to 
this but it more relates to messages not to a CMDB


Well, this message is very long already and I could even write more, but 
I will first wait and see if anyone of you answers to me.

Kind regards and thank you in advance


-- 

Timo Veith                             Tel:  +49-7071-29-70389
Universität Tübingen                   Fax:  +49-7071-29-5912
Zentrum für Datenverarbeitung          Mail: [email protected]
Wächterstraße 76
72074 Tübingen