Do we get to know on which application server is running and who is the application owner

[Gayathri5]

Hi CMDB Experts,

I tried to find out is there is mapping between on which application the server is running and who is the application owner for that server?

I am new bee in CMDB, so need help, any help would be of great help.

Regards,

G

[CMDB Whisperer]

It sort of depends what you mean by an "application"...

Strictly speaking, an "Application" CI (cmdb_ci_appl table and subclasses) in ServiceNow represents software that is installed and running as a process on a specific server.  These are typically discovered by a discovery tool, and are related to the Server using the "Runs on" relationship.

Colloquially, we are often referring to the entire application stack when we refer to an application.  For example, you might want to know where your Jira application is running.  But in reality, Jira is made up of smaller Application CIs (a web server, a database instance, etc.) each probably running on a different server, and none of them are called "Jira".  We refer to these as an "Application Service" (other common names are Application Instance, Deployment, System, Environment).  To answer "what server(s) are these running on" you need to actually break down the larger application stack into its components and answer it on a lower level.  ServiceNow does this using the Service Mapping product.  You would use this to map your "Jira Production" application service to its individual Application and infrastructure CIs that it is comprised of, including the application server and the database server.

At the top level, the "Business Application" is the technology that is selected to perform a function or provide a capability.  So in this example, "Jira" would be a Business Application selected to perform the functions of agile development management, defect tracking, etc.  It doesn't run on any servers, per se; it merely represents that we have selected that software product to perform that function.  It does have a relationship to the specific deployed instances (Application Services), and those are comprised of the actual Applications that run on Servers.

Bottom line, this is how this is represented in ServiceNow CMDB according to the Common Service Data Model framework and standard CI relationships:

Business Application ─consumes→ Application Service ─depends on→ Application ─runs on→ Server

or, for example:

Jira ─consumes→ Jira Production ─depends on→ Tomcat@APPSERVER01 ─runs on→ APPSERVER01

Jira ─consumes→ Jira Production ─depends on→ MySQL@DBSERVER01 ─runs on→ DBSERVER01

(For the record, I don't actually know whether Jira runs on Tomcat or MySQL, this is just an example)