Can you use Dynamic CI Group to create/maintain CIs for a business service?

[LC-303]

We are attempting to implement our CMDB ideally using the CSDM 4.0 model.

I want to know, if it is possible/ advisable to use Dynamic CI Group CIs related directly to business services, or does there have to be an application service as well every time?

[Paul Kilkelly]

Ah, requirements like 'log incidents against the correct Service (Business Service) and Service Offerings' are so unhelpful 😉 Users will want to raise incidents against the CI that is affected (what the user 'uses'), not the 'service that provides them'.  

[LC-303]

Thankfully they are logging the incidents themselves on behalf of customers calling them!

There will be some CIs for servers as well which need to be related to the device CIs, would I bother creating technical service and service offerings for those to sit under?

[Jim Zeigler1]

Keep in mind that there are still places in the documentation (and the Service Mapping application) which refer to Business Services (the original name for the superclass for all ITOM Services). Newer OOTB task forms have both a configuration item field and a Service field. The field name on the form may still be "business_service" (a reference to the Service class). This allows the reference to be to an Application Service or a parent Application Service group. If you see any reference attributes called "business_service", they are asking for an Application Service. I prefer to relabel all these as "Application Service" to avoid confusion. 

See the attached PDF showing the evolution of the Service Class names.

If you are using a migrated instance that was created before Rome(CSDM 2.0), you may still see the original labels on the Service Classes in the class manager because the upgrade process for new releases does not relabel the service classes and dictionary attributes to their new names under CSDM 2.0 through CSDM 4.0. This has caused great confusion.

I have an update set (that I can share) that relabels older migrated instances to match CSDM 4.0 names (the labels you will get with a new Rome-Tokyo instance). 

It's quite ironic that the original Technical Service class(cmdb_ci_query_based_service) is still used to model ITOM infrastructure services but it was relabeled as Dynamic CI Group to make way for Technical Service, an SPM class that is used to model Service Catalog Offerings for creating ITOM infrastructure Services.

[LC-303]

I should also say that they are going to depend on our pre-loaded foundation data (locations, etc.) for the incident logging, as they are setting up the same thing in hundreds of locations, eventually