How to set a dependency relationship for application services populated via dynamic CI groups

annetirez
Tera Contributor

Use case: I have an application APP01 and it runs on servers named like this LVNAPP01, ROMAPP01, PARAPP01, ...

I can link all these servers to the application service APP01 using Dynamic CI group and selecting a CMDB query that filters all servers that contain "APP01'.  

But, what I can't do is set a relationship that says that that the application APP01 runs-on these servers.

And if I enter an incident for the APP01 or for one of the servers, I don't find the relationship between both in the dependency view.

Is this not possible or am I missing something?

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

CMDB Whisperer
Mega Sage
Mega Sage

According to how an Application (cmdb_ci_appl and subclasses) is defined, it represents a specific application running on a specific server.  It should run on multiple servers.  Rather, you should have an application running on each server. For example:

APP01@LVNAPP01 == Runs on ==> LVNAPP01

APP01@ROMAPP01== Runs on ==> ROMAPP01

APP01@PARAPP01== Runs on ==> PARAPP01

 

There are two common scenarios where you would have this pattern: in one case you are looking to represent an Application resource that is running on multiple nodes of a Server cluster; in the other case you are running the same Application on multiple servers that are each part of different instances of the overall Business Application, i.e. separate Application Services.  In each case, there would be a separate Application CI for each Server, as the Application represents a distinct running process and software installation.  How this looks in the Dependency Map will be different depending on which scenario you are looking at. 

 

As for creating an Incident against the Application, typically a user isn't going to be selecting the application directly, but rather, would focus on the Application Service that depends on the specific Application(s); the CI would only be set to the Application either as a result of application monitoring / event management which would automate the incident creation based on where the issue was detected, or based on further analysis by the support team who is working the incident as they get closer to refining the root causes of the incident.  However, if the user does select the specific application, they would see only the specific server it is running on.  If they wanted to see the Application Service which contains multiple Applications running on multiple Servers, they can refocus the dependency map on the Application Service node.


The opinions expressed here are the opinions of the author, and are not endorsed by ServiceNow or any other employer, company, or entity.

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7 REPLIES 7

This makes sense. If these are separate installations, we need to have different application services for each. 

I could make a parent application service to group them together if we want to have incidents for just the app rather then every single installation.

yojan
Giga Contributor

Hello all

With the implementation that we have configured (see image), for creating incidents the attributes to be completed are:

  1. caller / affected user
  2. service (just technical or business, as the only ones with offerings)
  3. service offering (selecting the one that better fit the incident)
  4. configuration item (application service environment affected)
    1. if there are individual infra CIs or more application services involved, they can be entered in the lower tab named "additional CIs/services)
  5. assignment group (from the ones configured as "does incidents for" in the offering selected)

In that way, all works quite good... but I would advise you to create catalog entries that raises incidents in a snow front-end portal, as they configure incidents (and other type of tickets) in the right way withouth worrying about attribute order... 🙂

 

Hope that my 5 cents helps... 🙂

 

Best regards

Juan Mariaproducts and portfolios.png

annetirez
Tera Contributor

Hi Juan Maria,

thanks for the information. We are not so far in implementing CSDM and are not using services yet, but thanks for sharing.