Having Application Services without Business Application associated?

[Tobias]

Hi, 

My overall task is to streamline the Business Application and Application Services tables. Part of this is associating Applications Services to Business Application. We do not populate Application table.

And preparing for associating Tech/Business service offerings to Application Services - and discovery.

To my understanding Application Services represents instances of a Business Application - i.e. you would not have an Application Service without it being associated to a Business Application. 

However it seems not everything adds up to a Business Application. Thus without an Application Service, how to associate Business service offerings. 

A couple of example CI's of things currently in Application Service table (needed for incident handling)

1. Generic 'Print servers' and 'print drivers' CI's  -> providing print services, but not as such an application. 

2. Different web domains -> could be moved to cmdb_ci_web_site, but how to relate to Business Service Offering. 

3. Other application parts which are not typical business application + mobile phone apps. 

Looking forward to your input

[Christian Prob2]

Hi Tobias,

Not all CIs must (or can) relate to an application service.

Your first example (printing) is typically a technical service, that can be very well not linked to any application service, or business application.

(That said if it comes with any kind of management and / or configuration software you may want to model those as application services and make them part of the printing service)

Since you probably offer the printing services to your 'clients', you can also model it as a business service. A similar example was provided by ServiceNow for "Client Compute Services": 

In one of the ServiceNow youtube videos it was mentioned that the world is not always clearly green or orange, sometimes you have to make a call if you want to handle it as a business or technical service. The recommendation was, that if you have clients 'subscribing' to it, you probably want to model it as a business service.

The web domains may be a combination - they could be part of a technical service (DNS / domain management) as well, but most likely you also want to add the actual URLs to the respective Application Service of the site / app that can be reached under that URL (assuming you are supporting those apps/sites).

If you are in a situation where your 'client' just gets the domain from you, that would be the a similar model as above, instead of the Laptops you have the domains and the Business Service (Offering) is something along "domain management".

Not sure what "other application parts" you are referring to.

Mobile Apps I would also model as an application service and they would / could link to the same business services as their desktop counterparts, but there would be different service offerings: "XYZ Prod - mobile" and "XYZ Prod - browser", or "XYZ Prod - fat client".

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Christian

Please mark helpful or correct if deemed so. Thank you!

[Tobias]

Hi @Christian Probst 

Thanks for the detailed input. 

Reading through this and looking at the illustration my first thought is regarding the relationships between the offerings and infrastructure CI's. 

My concern stems from looking at the CSDM model where it seem an Application Service is always "in between" these - I.e. a BSO should always be linked to APS - or am I missing something? Being to rigid? 

It seems the model does not embrace CI's adding up to provide a BSO/BS where there is no Application Service. 

 

Regarding web domains you mention having these as Application Services - to my understanding this contradicts the approach of Application Services being instances of a Business Application? Unless web domains are perceived as Business Applications of course. 

/Tobias 

[SebastianKunzke]

Hi Tobias,

ServiceNow has various types of application services. And all of them have different functions and give your the possibility to do such a mapping you see in the framework. You can find all types here:

For you the type "Dynamic CI Group" is important. Because that's the type of application services, which wouldn't require an application context, because it is just a group of CIs. For your named examples (printer, apps) I would use them.

For websites I may wouldn't, because the website is hosted somewhere, so the hosting could be the application service. The website depend on these application

Kind regards

Sebastian

[Christian Prob2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Tobias,

if you take a look here: CSDM Example Series: Shared Tech and Client Compute Services  around 8:20 Mark explains on a client compute service how the CIs (laptops) are directly linked to the business service offering. In those scenarios, there simply is no Application Service in the picture. I would not get too hung up on the overview diagram as that naturally won't display all the details.

Regarding the web domains maybe you can provide more details, how exactly you represent each single web domain at this point, and also how you identify and 'discover' them (and here I don't imply you must use the ServiceNow Discovery product).

My train of thought here is that the web domain would probably be part of some sort of web application, website or so, and that would make them a CI of the respective Application Service. But I am not sure what level of detail you are tracking.

I have also seen organisations setting up a service and service offering to manage the various domains the organization has registered and need to be managed.

Does that make sense?

Christian

...and always happy for "Helpful" or marking an answer as "correct". Thank you!