Linking Service Offerings to secondary/backing App Services?

[Talal Najam]

We have a service offering 'A' that is linked to an App Service 'B'. However, to deliver it's functionality, App Service 'B' calls out to App Service 'C' and 'D', which I'm referring to as backing applications / 3rd party / secondary applications.

To link them from a CSDM perspective, we're currently linking Service Offering 'A' with all the app services 'B', 'C', and 'D', so we get a holistic view of each service that delivers the functionality and if an issue occurs in any of the backing applications. But, when linking this way, we currently don't have a way to mark which one is the primary / main application and which ones are the backing applications from a CSDM reporting perspective.

Is this the right approach to linking Business Service Offerings with App Services (service maps, with the default relationship depends on::used by)? If so, how do you tackle identifying the "main" app for a given service offering. Thanks

[suvro]

There is no need to identify main app. Building correct relationships is what matters the most.

[Brian Hewey]

Just an idea....Its a little bit "off book" but you could change the relationship type of secondary apps something else like Contains or maybe uses.   Typically used for other record relationships but it would at least allow you to identify it visually.  You would want to confirm if that has any impact on things like APM if you use it.

[SebastianKunzke · Accepted solution]

I would say, you only link the main application to the business service. The main application depends on the secondary applications. So in your case the relationship would be:

Business Service Offering 'A' depends on / used by main application service 'B'

Main application service 'B' depends on /used by 2nd application service 'C'&'D'

This view would indicate the different level and in case of an issue, you could see, what is affected. 

[Mary Vanatta1]

I agree with Sebastian on this one.  If one of the secondary apps goes down, then the main application service is likely to have an outage or issues. Those secondary apps make up the larger Application Service.