Best Practices for Adding Relationships to an application ( CSDM point of view)

[12Fred24]

Hi,

I’m currently working with the SailPoint Identity IQ application to align with CSDM.

I would like to add some related relationships with other CI or applications (such as Active Directory, which is clearly linked with it, or some servers for instance ). However, I’m unsure of where exactly to add these relationships to ensure they are correctly represented and maintainable.

Would it be more appropriate to add these at the Application Service level, the Technical Service level, or the Technical Service offering level ? 

I have a technical service named : Identity and access management , tech service offering is Access management ( SailPoint Identity IQ) and the App Service :  SailPoint Identity IQ - Prod

Any comments or ideas are welcomed, thank you!

Fred

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @12Fred24,

As far as I am aware there are a couple of options, depending on your CSDM maturity and whether you use Enterprise Architecture (was APM).

1. Without the EA product typically you could establish an App Service Depends on::Used by App Service relationship, where Sailpoint and AD are dependent. The caveat with this approach is that if used widely across a large environment the end result could be hundreds of (impacted) App Services being added to a Change when certain CIs are added to Affected CIs.
2. With the EA product you could use Digital Integration Management to track the flow of data between business applications at the interface level. This is a better approach as it more accurate reflects what is actually happening, but it is likely to require a lot of work.

Whichever approach you take, or if you find a more suitable approach for your use case, it is recommended that connections between applications be made at the application layer and not the service or service offering layer.

I hope this helps.