Recording Public Cloud dependencies of SAAS instances

[damianfell]

So I'm probably not the only person who has been asked this question today:

Why don't we have the dependencies of our various SAAS providers on AWS recorded in the CMDB?

Aside from the debate about whether we should or not, I know I'm likely to have to propose a mechanism to record this so that someone can make a decision as to whether we want to go ahead.

The main criteria is that we can identify if a major AWS/IBM/Azure/Oracle/GCP outage occurs to enable our major incident team to add it to an incident and see which of our SAAS purchases from other providers are impacted.

Trying to make this CSDM5 compliant as well so we don't need to customise anything.

We already have Service Instances for all our SAAS applications (with no current mapped components because they are SAAS) against which we habitually record incidents and use support groups for ticket routing, so my current thoughts are:

• Flip all the SAAS service instances from just being a base-class service instance (cmdb_ci_service_auto) to being a calculated service (cmdb_ci_service_calculated).
• Create a service instance for each of the cloud platforms, no actual technical or business service offering for them as they aren't our components.
• Enable the Service Owners to add a 'depends on::Used by' relationship to those cloud platforms and let the calculation include them in the service map for the SAAS app.

Does this feel right, or can anyone think of a better way.

N.B. Personally I think this is a knee jerk due to this morning's chaos making people aware how many unrelated SAAS apps have common components, and that once the size of the job for someone to maintain it becomes apparent it's not likely to go ahead.