Getting to Configuration Items on a Dashboard from a Technical Service

[ayman_h]

Hi,

As part of our CSDM and CMDB implementation, we currently have Dynamic CI groups populating Technical Service Offerings with CIs, these TSOs are under Technical Services.

Our requirement is for a Technical Service owner to able to view their Technical Services on a dashboard and then drill down/filter to the Technical Service Offering level and then view all the CIs linked to it. The main aim is to get to the CIs for a Technical Service owner.

We are aware the dependency map provides this functionality with a couple of settings applied but would be nice to have it on a dashboard. Is there an OOTB dashboard we could use or has anyone been successful using Database views to build something similar?

Regards,

Ayman

[Mathew Hillyard · Accepted solution]

I'm not aware of an OOTB dashboard that returns a top down service view that also works with Dynamic CI Groups and their CIs. This may be because not every table in CSDM is connected via CI Relationships. This presents reporting/visualization challenges in two cases:

1. Service to Service Offering is a parent/child relationship. You will not see a parent service in the dependency view when running the map from the Service Offering (but it is possible to configure dependency views to show the full map when running it from the parent Service).
2. Dynamic CI Groups do not use CI Relationships.

The data model for Dynamic CI Group to CI is:

• Dynamic CI Group [cmdb_ci_query_based_service] contains reference variable CMDB Group
  • CMDB Group [cmdb_group] table is referenced by 3 tables:
    • CMDB Group Contains Saved Query [cmdb_group_contains_qb_query] - one or more Query Builder Queries
    • CMDB Group Contains Encoded Query [cmdb_group_contains_encoded_query] - a list of one or more encoded queries on a CMDB table
    • CMDB Group Contains Configuration Item [cmdb_group_contains_ci] - one or more manually added CIs

When any records are added to or removed from these 3 related tables, a background job synchronizes them with the Service Configuration Item Association [svc_ci_assoc] table. This is also the table where all other Application Services linked to CIs will be populated using either Service Mapping, or via Mapped Application Services [cmdb_ci_service_discovered], manually, or via Calculated Application Services [cmdb_ci_service_calculated], automatically once you have linked one or more CIs to the Application Service.

As the Service Configuration Item Association table therefore contains every App Service and DCG and its related CIs, this is the best location to obtain the App Services/DCGs and their CIs. To get top-down from Service to CIs simply build a Database View and link Service Offering to CI Relationship to Service Configuration Item Association:

• Table 1: Service Offering
• Table 2: CI Relationship (where parent is sys_id of table 1 record)
• Table 2: Service Configuration Item Association [where service_id sys_id is child of table 2 record]

See the screenshot below.

The first column is Service (parent), the second column is Service Offering (CI Relationship Parent), the third either App Service or DCG (CI relationship Child) and the final column is the CI (CI Id).

You will need to filter out Endpoints (these are added for Application Services) and in a report you can rename the column labels to something more appropriate.

The only limitation with this list of records is that you will not see a hierarchy of the CIs. The Service Configuration Item Association table flattens the layers of CI Relationship hierarchy and returns all of the CIs within the Application Service Map. And for DCGs there is no hierarchy, so the structures are fundamentally different.

I hope this helps!

[ayman_h]

Excellent, thanks @Mathew Hillyard, I will definitely give this a try!