Citrix Infrastructure CSDM/CMDB

[raymondbraghett]

Hello Community,

I am facing the challenge of mapping our Citrix infrastructure in the ServiceNow CSDM model and in our CMDB.

It must be possible to model the following hierarchy levels:

Hierarchy level 1: Environment (number of environments = 2)

Hierarchy level 2: Zones (number of zones = 10)

Hierarchy level 3: Citrix roles (number of roles/silos approx. 80)

On the one hand, the structure should be CSDM compatible, i.e. when a new incident is created, either the server CI or the role should be able to be selected in the Configuration Item field. If the role is selected, all CIs that are linked to this role should be listed in the incident under Affected CIs. On the other hand, the objects should be displayed in the Dependency View as shown below:

   

I have set up 2 variants for myself as a test.

Variant 1:

Hierarchy level 1: Environment (as Technical Service Offering)

Hierarchy level 2: Zones (as Application Service)

Hierarchy level 3: Citrix roles (as Dynamic CI Group) without CMDB group. The Server CIs were connected to the Dynamic CI Group with relationships.

Advantage:

Server CIs that are linked to a role are displayed directly in the Dependency View.

Disadvantage:

If I select the Dynamic CI Group in the Configuration Item field in the Incident, the two Server CI's are not listed under the "Affected CI's" tab.

Variant 2:

Hierarchy level 1: Environment (as Technical Service Offering)

Hierarchy level 2: Zones (as Application Service)

Hierarchy level 3: Citrix roles (as Dynamic CI Group) with an attached CMDB group and manually added server CIs.

Advantage:

If I select the Dynamic CI Group in the Configuration Item field in the Incident, the two Server CI's are listed in the "Affected CI's" tab.

Disadvantage:

Servers which are added in the CMDB group are not displayed in the Dependency View.

Questions that this raises for me:

• With variant 2, is it a problem if I associate a Dynamic CI group with a CMDB group on the one hand and at the same time link the CIs which are in the CMDB group additionally with relations to the Dynamic CI group?
• Does ServiceNow have a best practice procedure for mapping my requirements?
• If not, have any of you already implemented something similar?

Many Thanks
Raymond

[Barry Kant]

Hi Raymond, 
I haven't seen application services with Dynamic CI Groups nested like this before. I am not sure what the purpose of the dynamic CI group is in this example. Also I am not sure if the Citrix Satellite is an Application Service. What is delivered are virtual clients hosted via citrix platform, like VMs hosted on ESX clusters. In such examples I am not used to position the ESX platform either a Citrix platform as Application Service. 

Depending on the property settings for incident and change it may or may not work for impact analysis. 

scenario 1 - using CI relations
Impact analysis will work as long as a CI is filled as configuration item (as it looks upstream), as there are CI relations and the CI relation lookup is checking upstream to classes extended from the base cmdb_ci_server class. 

scenario 2 - using ci associations (these are not shown in dependency view indeed)
Impact analysis will work for a single service_id (it is not a recurring job). Meaning if there is a server CI filled in the incident, it will find the Dynamic CI Group as affected service, but not the Citrix satelitte zone Application Service. 

Not sure what class is used for the Application Service record. If you would like to do it this way than a dynamic CI group is an option as well. This will create associations based on CI relations (for a number of levels depth). 


from an operational point of view I think understanding impact is a preferred capability (must have) and CI visualization is less of an value.

BR,
Barry