This is part-two of CSDM (Common Service Data Model). Part one was around foundational data.
Defining the business outcomes, aligning metric to measure success, getting your baselines, ensuring ownership, and then start by validating your foundational data.
During the Crawl phase, the focus shifts toward our base-system CMDB tables: business application, application service, application (discoverable), and server/host (discoverable).
The dashboard can help identify issues with your business app and app services.
Business Applications (cmdb_ci_business_app), A Business Application represents the inventory or portfolio of applications used within the organization, along with their associated metadata, such as ownership, purpose, and business capability alignment.
- It is not an operational CI and therefore should not be referenced directly in Incident, Problem, or Change records.
- It is not version-specific, the Business Application object describes the conceptual application (e.g., “SAP Finance” or “Salesforce CRM”), rather than individual deployed instances or versions.
Application Services (cmdb_ci_service_auto), An Application Service represents the deployed, operational instance of a related Business Application or its associated SDLC components.
Each Application Service typically corresponds to a specific environment or deployment context, such as Development, QA, or Production, and may also vary by region or geography (e.g., EMEA, NA, APAC).
- Multiple Application Services can exist for a single Business Application, each reflecting a unique deployment or hosting context.
- This CI type is operationally significant and is often the object selected when an incident caller reports an issue with an enterprise application.
- It provides the bridge between business visibility (via Business Application) and operational management (via supporting infrastructure and services).
An Application (cmdb_ci_appl) represents any deployed program, module, or collection of software components designed to deliver specific functionality on a compute infrastructure, whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based.
While the application may ultimately be the root cause of an incident, it often isn’t the first element to surface an alert unless event management is in place.
- This table does not serve as your application inventory or portfolio (that role belongs to the Business Application table).
- It is a technical configuration item (CI) that is automatically created and maintained by Discovery.
- It typically reflects a discoverable installation or running software process, identified through network communication on defined ports or services.
- Manual population is not recommended, as doing so undermines Discovery integrity and data accuracy.
Part three will start at the Walk phase.
