CSDM 4.0 Application Service Service Offerings

[CheshireKat]

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.

[CheshireKat]

Thank you. We have a use case where we track availability for a sub-set of the application services. Leveraging an Application Service- Service Offering seems to be the most logical way to isolate these for tracking and reporting. It is a third use case for a Service Offering specific to individual application performance.

[CMDB Whisperer]

Yes, it might seem that way.  But that is only because of how you are thinking of the term Application Service.  Ask yourself these questions:

• Who is using these applications that you are looking to measure availability on?  
• Who will be complaining if the applications don't meet the availability commitments?
• Are those entities inside your company or external from your company?

If your consumers are outside your company, then (this is up for some debate in other Community articles) arguably, this is a Business Service Offering by definition.  If they are inside your company then it is a Technical Service Offering or a Business Service Offering, depending on the context and what the application is used to provide them.

Assuming it is a Business Service Offering, and that's why you are measuring availability to meet customer service level agreements, then the next question is how to classify the parent Business Service in a Portfolio of service with a Taxonomy that you define, and thus you can identify that you are providing application services that have external customer availability requirements.  So from that perspective your Business Service Offering would exist in a Portfolio of application hosting related services (for example.)  But it's still a business service offering because you are providing business outcomes to business consumers using your "application service".

[SteveMacWWT]

CMDB Whisperer - Yes, Yes, YES!!!! Application 'Service' causes so much confusion; even though I'm consistently saying Application Instance, when I use the CSDM documentation (especially the images) to demonstrate something, Application Service 'pops up' and folks get confused again. 

I thought I heard Mark Bodman say something about this possibly changing in the future (but can't find where it was), so I hope that is still in the plan. 

[John159]

Hi SteveMacWWT,

 You’ll find it in this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/6MrekggoQ4A

App service is likely to be rebranded to ‘system’ which makes a lot more sense to me as I agree the term app service tends to confuse those new to the CSDM data model.

[Jim Zeigler1 · Accepted solution]

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