CSDM 4.0 Application Service Service Offerings

CheshireKat · ‎04-25-2023

Hello SNOW CSDM Team,

Has anyone encountered the need to track availability for individual application services using a service offering? If so, is there a diagram that illustrates how this fits into the CSDM 4.0 model? It seems like a reasonable use case to use a service offering to track availability for an application service when needed (example: to tie back actual availability to a vendor contract). Just wondering if this was left out of the visual models for a reason.

I appreciate your thoughts and any documentation for reference.

Jim Zeigler1 · ‎05-03-2023

I'd like to understand why ITOM operational services (Application Services) are frequently included in CSDM discussions about SPM Services. ITOM and SPM "Services" live in 2 different hierarchies in the CMDB, representing 2 totally different concepts (despite the fact that they unfortunately share the same base class). If you look carefully at the CMDB Schema, ITOM Application Services and SPM catalog Services do not interact directly with each other(see details below).

ITOM Services

ITOM Application Services (labeled in the CMDB as "Business Services" prior to CSDM) model sets of deployed Business Applications that are deployed to Infrastructure Services (e.g., farms of Web, Application and Database servers) consisting of Network and Server CIs.
Infrastructure Services are modeled using Dynamic CI Groups (labeled in the CMDB as "Technical Services" prior to CSDM) which are a subclass of Application Service.
ServiceNow ITOM applications provide the tools(e.g., Operator Workspace) needed to manage the availability of the operational service hierarchy from the highest level Application Service Group down to the most detailed CIs created by discovery to model hardware and application components and configuration.
The availability and state of infrastructure CIs used by Application Services directly affect the operational state of the Application Service, so they are monitored closely. Alerts propagate up to the top of the operational hierarchy. The current operational state of all ITOM Services can be viewed using the operator workspace dashboard(which is usually monitored 24x7 by most companies).
Each Applications Service Group contains Application Services and Application Service Groups it operationally depends on. The highest level Application Service Groups represent the operational state of Corporate-level Business capabilities (e.g., Lines of Business like Manufacturing, IT, Sales, Support,Marketing) which are based on operational state of the Application Services the depend on. As you move down the hierarchy, you will eventually see Service Maps for each Application Service.

SPM Services(including Service Offerings)

SPM Services were created to model the taxonomy of requests made available to consumers through Service Catalogs/Portals (They are all part of the CSDM Sell/Consume Quadrant)
SPM Services spawn Service Requests that are defined in and execute in the ServiceNow Cloud, not in the ServiceNow customer's Data Centers.
Service Requests may trigger automations(e.g., Server Build Scripts) that run in the customer managed Data Centers. These automations could be modeled in the CMDB as batch jobs that are part of an ITOM Application Service(Dynamic CI Group) that has an operational state. Each of these batch jobs may have a relationship to the CIs they create, but the SPM Service(which is a template for a Service Request) doesn't have relationships defined in the CMDB to operational CIs (e.g., Hardware and Application CIs).
If required, critical SPM Services and Service Offerings URLs could be modeled as manually created CIs belonging to a 3rd Party(SAAS) Application Service called "ServiceNow Catalog Service" (Represented as a Dynamic CI Group because SAAS entry points can't be discovered by Service Mapping).
To summarize, SPM catalog Services and Service Offerings have no operational status, even if Service Requests they spawn were represented as operational CIs(e.g., Batch Jobs).

Is an ITOM Application Service a service?

Can we all accept Microsoft's use of the term "Service" (as used in Microsoft Windows when application functions are bound together to "run as a service")?
- For example, MID Server Applications bundled together and deployed on Windows to "Run as a service".
Microsoft Services execute, can be monitored, and have an operational status just like Application Services defined by ServiceNow.

The answer is Yes.

Is an SPM Service a Service?

They don't "Run" on customer infrastructure or on the ServiceNow cloud. They are more like metadata for Service Requests that "Run" in ServiceNow.
They are not Monitored
They don't have an operational status

View solution in original post

Barry Kant · ‎04-25-2023

Good day,
Yes you are right. I think we always link an Application Service to a Business Service Offering. Primarily for Production solutions. The Business Service Offering might be more to tie back to the Consumer agreement.
On the Technical Service Offering it can tie back to the vendor agreement as they provide the service.

BR,
Barry

CheshireKat · ‎04-26-2023

Thank you, Barry. Is there a link to the .png file source perhaps? It won't open for me as is. Just to clarify, in the CSDM 4.0 model is it reasonable to have three classifications of Service Offerings in the Digital Portfolio MGMT space (Business Service, Technical Service, Application Service)? When I think about the design, it seems like the Application Service/Service Offering would measure the health/availability of the individual apps, then the Technical Services and Business Services branch off from here and use this information as a part of the calculation for their various services/functions (since these are composed of multiple components and include the App Service as one part of the weighted calculation)?

CMDB Whisperer · ‎04-26-2023

You have it flipped upside down. The application service doesn't represent a third kind of service offering. Rather, the application service sits underneath the technical or business service offering. The offering is classified by the Technical or Business Service, which describes what kind of valuable outcomes are being delivered. There is no "application service outcome". You are either using that application to deliver business outcomes (like delivering some service to business customers, through a managed hosted application) or technical outcomes (like delivering technology to internal teams who then likely use that technology for delivering business outcomes, at some level). There isn't a concept of an "Application Service Offering" because according to these definitions there isn't a need for one.

The opinions expressed here are the opinions of the author, and are not endorsed by ServiceNow or any other employer, company, or entity.

CMDB Whisperer · ‎04-26-2023

I actually think this is one of the problems with the term "Application Service" because it tempts us to think of it as a different kind of service, but it really isn't that at all. It's more of a system, or a deployed instance of an application. It only acts like a service in a very abstract way, and only in the platform, not in reality. If you think of it more like an application instance, I think your confusion will go away and it will clear the path for you to envision your use case within the lens of CSDM.

The opinions expressed here are the opinions of the author, and are not endorsed by ServiceNow or any other employer, company, or entity.