This ITIL4F practice question tests your understanding of itil management practices. This is a configuration task: choose the command set that satisfies every stated requirement. Small differences — like 'secret' vs 'password' or 'transport input ssh' vs 'all' — change whether the answer is correct. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
An organization notices that the CMDB contains outdated information about several configuration items. Which ITIL 4 practice is primarily responsible for maintaining accurate CI data?
Service Configuration Management
This practice manages the CMDB and configuration baselines.
Deployment Management
Why wrong: Deployment Management moves releases into live environments.
IT Asset Management
Why wrong: IT Asset Management focuses on financial and lifecycle aspects of assets, not necessarily CI data accuracy.
Change Enablement
Why wrong: Change Enablement manages changes, not the CMDB.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
Service Configuration Management
Service Configuration Management is the ITIL 4 practice responsible for maintaining accurate and reliable information about configuration items (CIs) throughout their lifecycle. It ensures the CMDB reflects the current state of CIs, including relationships and attributes, by controlling updates through defined processes and audits. Outdated CI data directly indicates a failure in this practice's core function of configuration control and status accounting.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
Service Configuration Management
Why this is correct
This practice manages the CMDB and configuration baselines.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Deployment Management
Why it's wrong here
Deployment Management moves releases into live environments.
IT Asset Management
Why it's wrong here
IT Asset Management focuses on financial and lifecycle aspects of assets, not necessarily CI data accuracy.
Change Enablement
Why it's wrong here
Change Enablement manages changes, not the CMDB.
Common exam traps
The trap here is that candidates confuse IT Asset Management (which tracks financial and contractual data) with Service Configuration Management (which tracks technical configuration data), leading them to choose Option C even though the CMDB's accuracy is a configuration management responsibility, not an asset management one.
Detailed technical explanation
Under the hood, Service Configuration Management relies on a Configuration Management System (CMS) that may integrate with discovery tools (e.g., using SNMP, WMI, or SSH) to automatically populate and update CI attributes like version, location, and status. A subtle behavior is that even with automated discovery, manual updates or reconciliation processes are often required to handle CIs that are not network-accessible or that have complex relationships, such as virtual machines with dynamic resource pools. In a real-world scenario, a misconfigured discovery schedule or a failure in the federation of data from multiple sources (e.g., cloud APIs, hypervisors) can lead to stale CI records, which then cause incorrect impact analysis during incident or change management.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
A practitioner preparing for the ITIL4F exam encounters this exact type of scenario on the job. The correct answer here is not the most general option — it is the best answer for the specific constraint described. Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option. Real exam questions reward reading the full scenario before eliminating options, because the constraint defines which answer fits.
What to study next
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FAQ
ITIL Management Practices — This question tests ITIL Management Practices — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: Service Configuration Management — Service Configuration Management is the ITIL 4 practice responsible for maintaining accurate and reliable information about configuration items (CIs) throughout their lifecycle. It ensures the CMDB reflects the current state of CIs, including relationships and attributes, by controlling updates through defined processes and audits. Outdated CI data directly indicates a failure in this practice's core function of configuration control and status accounting.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 24, 2026
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