The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) specifies the use of a Configuration management system (CMS) or Configuration management database (CMDB) as a means of achieving industry best practices for Configuration Management.
CMDBs are used to track Configuration Items (CIs) and the dependencies between them, where CIs represent the things in an enterprise that are worth tracking and managing, such as but not limited to computers, software, software licenses, racks, network devices, storage, and even the components within such items.
The benefits of a CMS/CMDB includes being able to perform functions like root cause analysis, impact analysis, change management, and current state assessment for future state strategy development. Example systems, commonly identifies themselves as IT Service Management (ITSM) systems, include FreshService, ServiceNow and Samanage.