I have difficulties to understand some concepts in the CSDM, and how to implement the model in an effective way.

[Emanuele Tempr1]

1. What are the differences between application services and business applications?
2. Can i make a CI relationship between two business applications?
3. Can i make a CI relationship between business applications and application services? It does make sense to have such a relation?
4. What relation business service and application service have?
5. What's the point of having application serivce in the cmdb_ci_service table and also application service in the cmdb_ci_service_discovered table?
6. Which tables are mandatory to start using APM?

[CasperJT]

Hi Emanuele,

1. A Business Application is a representation of all deployments of an application service. For example, if you have ServiceNow deployed as Dev, Test and Prod. Each of these would be an Application Service, but would be represented as one Business Application "ServiceNow".

2. It is possible, but all relationships here would most likely be manually maintained, so probably it would not be advisable. The only official relationship I have seen between Business Applications was between Platform Host and Platform App (ie. ServiceNow (host) and ServiceNow Incident (app).

3. Yes, the idea is that you have a relationship between each Business Application and its individual deployments (Application Services).

4. Business Application Consumes::Consumed by Application Service

5. I don't think you are supposed to. cmdb_ci_service_discovered extends from the cmdb_ci_service table so you would just have duplicate information if maintaining in both.

6. According to the White Paper 2.0 you should get to the Fly stage in order to fully leverage APM.

You can find the CSDM White Paper 2.0 here: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_article&sys_id=f54be0f7db984c146064eeb5ca961...

[anubhavkapoor76]

The answers provided by CasperJT were very informative. However I would just like to add an icing on this cake:

1.Business Applications are logically made/maintained  in system or imported AND whereas Application Services are advisable not be created/maintained manually but discoverable.

Business Applications are not to be used in Incident or Change where as Application Service are.

3. Business Applications consume many Application Services.

4. Business Services are designed to be consumed from Business Users and therefore they are on Sell/Consume side ( refer to 2.0 Whitepaper) whereas Application Services are more to be used on Incident/Change and help the Service Desk etc..

Hope these explanations make it more clearer to you.

Tip: Many of the components in CSDM model would seem duplicate, however the personas have to be kept in view to understand their existence.

Cheers!!

Anubhav

[Emanuele Tempr1]

I saw that business applications have related ci scores calculated from metrics, assessment and PA. On of those indicators is the number of incident related to the business application, because on the task table there's a field that is a list with reference to the cmdb_ci_business_app table.

So my question would be, what does it mean that Business Applications are not to be used in Incident?

[CasperJT]

I'm not sure about the scores, but it could be an APM fucntion, since the Business Application is a roll-up of all the CI's that provide its functionality (from hardware, to software, to application service).

On the Incident form you have three intended CMDB fields:

1. Service (maps to cmdb_ci_service)
2. Service Offering (maps to service_offering)
3. Configuration Item (maps to cmdb_ci)

When ServiceNow say Business Applications should not be used in ITSM (Incident, Problem and Change) it is because it is not an Operational CI, meaning it is a representation of all your deployments and thus unspecific. So the Configuration Item field is meant for Application Services, Applications, Hardware etc.

Additionally, if you select a Business Application as your Configuration Item you will not get the 'roll-up' effect of the impacted services/ci's functionality since the Business Application is "upstream" from the Application Service.