Application Service to represent the 'System'

[RichardHeap]

Keen to hear from people/organisations who have used the application service to reflect the system, what worked well, what would you do differently if you were to do it again.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @RichardHeap,

Could you be a little more specific about "system"? Are you looking for general observations on creating and managing application services, tradeoffs with Discovery vs Service Mapping, or more specific information? Application Services could look very different depending on the way they were created - from the completely manual to the totally automated, as well as the many different types of architecture and technologies.

[RichardHeap]

Hi,

My thoughts are that when we are talking about Application Services, I believe the intent behind the 'Application Service' is to represent to deployed stack, which in my mind would represent what I would call or refer to as the system (including all deployed technology) not only the 'application instance' would you agree that this is what the application services is aiming to represent.

[Mathew Hillyard]

@RichardHeap,

Yes, you are correct. The CSDM defines an Application Service as "a logical representation of a deployed system or application stack". 

The purpose is to act as a figurehead of that stack and a single object to reference all its related CIs within Incident/Problem/Change in the platform - for example, if you are making a change to an application service that impacts all its underlying CIs you can set the Application Service as the CI on the Change Request, or if an Application Service has an issue but you're not sure of the root cause (yet) you can set the Application Service as the CI on an Incident.

Application Services are in reality a deployment of a Business Application in a given environment (Production, Test, Development) and/or geographical location for large enterprises.

In contrast, an Application (CI) is "any deployed program or module that is designed to provide specific functionality on specific compute infrastructure. An application defines behavior and has specific functionality associated with it." (again from CSDM v4.0).

The relationship is normally Application Service > Depends on::Used by >  Application.

One final point: Dynamic CI Groups are within the class hierarchy of the parent Automated Business Service [cmdb_ci_service_auto] class, but are principally designed to group related CIs together via queries (or manually). This can be a service map including an Application CI, but is normally only used for this context when Discovery is not yet in use.

Hope this helps?

[RichardHeap]

Thanks, that's what I thought.

From your own experience, are there any key learnings which you could share that others could avoid, we are starting from a greenbelt, so keen to learn from others, both good and bad.