How to name an Application Service?

[Alan Prochaska]

How do you all name your Application Service CIs?  

Do you have a naming standard that works?  

Anyone care to share or hold forth?

In our young implementation, Application Services primarily represent deployments of the application.  Someone decided to name the App Services "<bus app name> + <deployment type> + <version>".  This leads to long and clunky names.  For analytic or machine access it's easier to get deployment type and version from metadata, however, humans get confused and frustrated having multiple objects in the same class with the same name (distinguished by other meta data).

What do all of you do?  How do you name your app services?  And does it work effectively?

Thanks for feedback, thoughts, and stories.

Alan Prochaska

Kaiser Permanente

[CMDB Whisperer]

The convention I have seen most often, and the one I prefer, is to name it according to the business application that is deployed, concatenated with the Environment of the application service (or possibly an abbreviation thereof), maybe with some punctuation to separate.

So:

• Business Application: ServiceNow
• Application Services: ServiceNow - DEV, ServiceNow - TEST, ServiceNow - PROD

or 

• Application Services: ServiceNow Development, ServiceNow Test, ServiceNow Production

I agree with not overloading names with metadata!  But there is also the need to balance that with being user-friendly and informative.  The primary distinguishing data between different deployments of an application is (or should be) the Environment that it is used for.  If I am a user trying to log a request or incident against an Application Service CI, I need to be able to easily distinguish between the different applications.  And the Environment suffix is how we often speak about these instances, so it makes good sense to use it in the name.

[robert_w]

I'm currently using: <business application name> + <region> + <environment> 

So for example you would have:

"SAP FI - EMEA - PRD"

"Workday - US - DEV"

You could tweak this further if for example you have more than 1 DEV instance in a particular region:

"MyAppService - US - DEV - 1"

"MyAppService - US - DEV - 2"

[Cassandra Kittl]

Due to having a Business Application and mapped application service of the same name I tend to prefix the mapped application services with MAS vs <application name> only and on Business Applications, I have the suffix of Business Application - just in case I end up having a Service name the same as the Business application. For easier reference:

Business Application: XYZ Wizzywig Business Application

Business Service: XYZ Wizzywig 

Application Service: MAS XYZ Wizzywig 

[CMDB Whisperer]

How is that working for you?  I would think some users might not find that very intuitive.  Also, how do they distinguish between the Prod and non-Prod app services?