I spent fifteen years trying to make the CMDB work.

Fifteen years ago an ITIL Foundations slide sold me on the CMDB: every incident, change, problem, service, and asset pointing back to one understanding of the environment. I spent the next fifteen years trying to make it real, six or seven real attempts, and I never gave up on the idea. I gave up on the way we were told to build it.

The part I fell in love with was never the inventory. It was correlation: this alert is that incident, caused by that change, on that service. Then ITIL paired correlation with asset management and buried it under hundreds of attributes with different owners, different cadences, and different definitions of correct. Correlation needs the record to be right; asset management needs it complete; the job that mattered drowned.

So keep only the prize. An ICDB, an Identity Correlation Database, starts as a name and a type, and everything else is earned from the work: what it fired, what it belongs to, what fixed it. It is the thread that ties your records together, drawn from operational activity instead of maintained by hand. Keep your CMDB for compliance and assets; let the identity database provide the correlation your decisions depend on.