How to relate Technical Service Offering to Dynamic Group?

[NikEng1]

Hi,

So I am currently trying to implement the CSDM, focusing on Business Applications, Application Services and Technical Services.

I've gone trough most of the documentation and learning about the CSDM, but when trying it out I can't seem to understand how Technical Service Offerings are to be related to CI:s.

My View is that I have a business application. This Business Application relies on an application service. Since I do not have service mapping I will be using a dynamic CI group for the application service.

In the Application Service there are CI:s. In my case these are database instances and servers. The servers are the results of delivery of the technical service offering "Linux Hosting Small". In that sense, I am not setting up direct relationships between the application service and the technical service offering, but this relationship is indirect through the CI:s.

I was thinking something like this:

In other words, the technical service offering contains all servers, across multiple application services. 

My questions are:

Is this correct? I've seen the case where people instead create a relationship between a TSO and and application service. But I would assume that would only be relevant in the cases where the offering is an entire environment. In my organization, the application managers "buys" technical services like servers, backup, databases etc as separate pieces to make up their application environment. Will my  model still adhere to the CSDM?

How do I relate the TSO to a dynamic CI group? I am looking at the form for the Technical Service Offering and I can't find a button/option to set up and relate a dynamic CI group. The form has the usual CI relationship pane. Do I just create the dynamic CI group and manually set up relationships between it and the TSO in the cmdb_rel_ci table?

Since a server as a CI can be related to multipleTSO:s (like monitoring, the server itself, backup etc) I was thinking of having a related list of service offerings on the server CI form, where I can set up a m2m relationship between servers and TSO:s, the leveraging the related list conditions of the CMDB query builder to capture the servers into the dynamic groups for each TSO. Meaning the "Monitoring" TSO Dynamic Group would query the cmdb_si_server table to CI:s where the related list contains the "monitoring " TSO. Would this be a good idea? Any other suggestions?

Any help or just general feedback would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[Barry Kant]

Hi Victoria,

the last one is from TSO to related CIs via Dynamic CI Group (to sync data)

BR,
Barry

[scott_lemm]

@Jim Zeigler1 

Thank you for your response. I want to clarify an inaccuracy.

We (CSDM) did NOT declare that the Dynamic CI Group class is no longer part of ITOM. 

The Dynamic CI Group class has 2 purposes that include both the CI query-based grouping for TSOs AND  the pre-existing query-based grouping for Application Services. The development effort to expand the use/functionality of Dynamic CI Groups was done in partnership with IT Operations Management and CMDB. This collective effort has resulted in simplified management of the CMDB while improving upon the pre-existing ability to utilize queries for managing Application Services. Of course, many more use cases exist beyond TSOs & Application Services. 

Please feel free to reach out to me via email if you are experiencing issues using/implementing Dynamic CI Groups as they have been enabled. 

Thank you,

Scott Lemm, Sr. Product Manager CSDM

[Community Alums]

Hi Scott, 

I am quite new to ITOM and CSDM framework thus my questions might be very basic. But, I will be extremely grateful if you find time to respond to them.

1. When relating TSO to DCG to synchronize data “managers” relationship type is used, this allows transferring ownerships (Support, Change, Manage By groups) from the TSO level to the CIs that are the members of this DCG. Whereas, when AS is created using DCG method. DCG relates to the TSO via “contains” relationship and, from what I can observe, it doesn’t allow for synchronization of the ownership to the individual CIs. Why does this happen? What is the logic behind it?
2. On the DCG form, there are two types of CIs that are shown:
1. CMDB groups CIs
2. Service CIs

The latest seems to contain more records. Could you please elaborate more on this? 

Thank you,

Victoria

[Barry Kant]

Good day Victoria,

1 - from what I can see that shouldn't work like that. The initial trigger is a Business Rule:
CSDM - Sync Group Attributes

then it is creating a scheduled event and the relation query I see is:
'parent.sys_class_name=service_offering^child.sys_class_name=cmdb_ci_query_based_service'

so it checks that the parent class is Service Offering and the child class is Dynamic CI Group. No check on the relation type. 

I use for both relation type Contains. 

2 - by the looks of it the 1st is excluding Service (extended) records, but I have not validated that. 

Cheers,

Barry