Need your opinion, Technical Service or Application Service

[Alex111]

We're currently working through how to best categorize a variety of services between Technical Services and Application Services, and we'd love to get your thoughts. Security and Monitoring, in particular, tend to blur the lines for us, and having your perspective could really help us shape a clearer approach together.

Arista Awake Security NDR

Bloodhound Enterprise

Zerto

Dynatrace

Solarwinds

Idera

Tripwire

These are just a handful and as many of you know, security usually has a dozen or more tools.

I would love to for your thoughts on some (or all) and if you can provide a short reason why you selected them as technical or application services.

Many of these services appear to involve components that align with both Technical and Application categories, I'm hoping with more collaboration from everyone, I can get a better understanding how to document our services.

THANK YOU!!!

Alex

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @Alex111 

I wouldn't say CSDM is complicated. However, stakeholders at all levels need a clear description of each object and how they relate, with real-world examples they can understand. Without this, confusion will reign supreme!

The Technical Service Offering is there for technology consumers to request and to support the customer facing side of the application (or hardware for that matter). The Application Service/Service Instance represents a deployed stack in a given environment. This is required to act as the support point for the app from a technical support (rather than customer facing) perspective.

You could also say that requests might go to the support group on the Technical Service Offering (now Technology Management Service Offering) and incidents and problems that need App support are routed to the App Service support team. It doesn't have to be exactly this but it gives you some idea of the division of responsibility.

For a very small org these might be the same team - but it is still worth having both objects as otherwise you'll end up with data on the wrong table. For example, operational support data on Business Application, design information or service data on Application Service etc.

It's referenced in many posts in this forum, but the CSDM data model examples workbook on the Best Practices portal could help: https://mynow.servicenow.com/now/best-practices/assets/csdm-data-model-examples 

I hope this helps!

Mat

[averinh]

“In my opinion, it depends on what you prefer. Technical Service is better if you enjoy working with systems and solving technical issues. Application Service is better if you prefer working with software and helping users. Both have good opportunities — it’s just about what suits your skills and interest more.”