How do you Model a SaaS application in CSDM

[Stuart J]

I understand the value in creating a  Business Service / Service Offering  for the SaaS application,  but what is the value in creating an  Application Service, other than to use it to link to the Business Application record. 

[Sean Walters]

Hi Stuart,

If you follow CSDM guidelines , the use of application services is to define the logical deployment of that business application. It also is referred as the systems of the business application. 

If it is a SAAS application and therefore you are most likely going to have one application service for a business application. I would say that you would still use application service for incident and change management , you would never use business applications in ITSM modules as they not operational CI's, more conceptual. 

I hope that helps.

Please mark my answer correct and helpful if this resolves your issue

[EricDohr]

Hi Stuart,

Now Create has this great deck that outlines a few models to check out. In addition, Mark has a great YouTube video on Platforms that talks through some of these specific use cases.

The nice part of using an Application Service is that you can incorporate one or many Offerings as well as if there are other CIs that may work with that SaaS.  For example, if you have the ServiceNow platform and did a change request against that record (say you are going to patch), you will want to make sure any offerings that are correlated have visibility to that effort. 

Hope this helps, 

Eric

[mcastoe]

Hi Stuart,

to echo what Sean and Eric have said, that Application Service or Services is the tie-in to the rest of operations visibility, ITSM processes and the dependency model for systems supporting your Business Service Offering(s).  

It is quite possible that the SaaS Application Service depends on other Application Services such as SSO or perhaps other Application Services depend upon it.  That dependency model if highly valuable to understand with it comes to incident/problem/change.  Its likely you want to know everything affected?

Your team may not be ready for modeling your Business Services and offerings but when you are, that Application Service is the "it tooling" behind one or more Service Offerings and again, visibility of what powers what has value.

The linkage up to the Business Application is what ties you into Business alignment and Strategic Planning as well as tie-ins to facilities such as IRM, Software/Hardware Asset Management and again, even greater visibility.

hope this helps.