Offerings and Application Service Prescribed Relationships

[Bartosz Socha]

I have a problem with how prescribed relationships are defined to describe dependency between Service Offerings and Application Services. 

Let's consider two scenarios:

1. My company is a Managed Service Provider, it has several data centers and other companies use our hosting services to deploy and maintain virtual infrastructure. 

1. I'll have a Business Service "Virtual Machine Management (since the service we provide is THE business we run) Virtual Machine Management 
2. I'll have a number of Service Offerings where I stratify our BS into options
3. I'll have a Business Application which consists of two Application Stacks (one for prod, one for non-prod as we have 2 vCenter Servers)
4. I'll connect my Service Offerings to the Application Stacks with a Depends on::Used by relationships to show that I'm using vCenters as tools to manage virtual infra

2. My company runs a web store.

1. I'll have a Technical Service "Virtual Machine Management (since the service we provide is published to service owners and underpins another Business Service "I sell stuff through Web Store", application owners can request to provision and provision infra).
2. I'll have a number of Service Offerings where I stratify our Technical Service into options
3. I'll have a Business Application which consists of two Application Stacks (one for prod, one for non-prod as we have 2 vCenter Servers)
4. How do I show dependency of providing a technical service offering on an application service/ stack which is used as a tool for my offering's activities? The prescribed relationship between technical service offering and application service is "Contains::Contained by" but aren't this supposed to be used to determine which infra/stacks are in the scope of activities? 

Dear CSDM community, experts and whisperers: Do I have your blessing to use "Depends on:: Used by" relationship type to show a dependency of a technical service offering on an application stack which is used to deliver that offering? 

[Derrick-FMR]

The technical service offering isn't delivered by an application though - the technical service offering is delivered by a team of people in 'support' of an application service.  So there shouldn't be any need to use the depends on?  Feels like the group represented by the technical service is a consumer of the business application - and that should be captured through a business service offering (though not sure how that would work as I don't believe technical services would have anything to do with a business service offering)?

[Bartosz Socha]

The technical service offering isn't delivered by an application though - the technical service offering is delivered by a team of people in 'support' of an application service. 

I have a different scenario in mind. That team of people is delivering a TSO "Virtual Machine Build", they do it simply by logging in to a vCenter server and configuring new VMs there. If a vCenter server is down they can't deliver their TSO. Isn't that "TSO Virtual Machine Build" dependency on vCenter Server? 

[Derrick-FMR]

It is an interesting question because there is nothing within CSDM that allows for the business service offerings to link directly to the technical service offerings (yet).  I can see why the relationship would make sense, but also not sure about the complexity that would be introduced by allowing those connections?

[Barry Kant]

Hi Bartozs, 

you can have this depend on relation between Business Offerings depending on Technical Offerings as a supply chain of what you sell for consumption. The TSO is owning/supporting a number of CIs in the cmdb that could be Application Services , applications or infrastructure. The Application Service is depending on applications/infrastructure but not on a TSO. The TSO is owning/supporting the solutions.

BR,
Barry