Query on/Issue with 'Reference Attribute' for Business Serice and Service Offering

[Suggy]

Hello,

CSDM says relationship between 'Business Serice' and 'BS Offering' is "REFERENCE ATTRIBUTE

Q1 - What was the reason to use 'Reference Attribute'? Why cant we use 'CI relationship' itself? 

Q2 - Are we not supposed to create CI realtionships for BS and BSO? Any issues?

As per this post we need to use the Dependency Views --> Map Related Items 

Q3 - In this case, if I go to Business Offering 'BSM map view', I still cannot see this relationship in the map, but can see in from the 'Business service' form. Isnt this a gap? Any solution for this?

@Barry Kant  @CMDB Whisperer or any other experts, if you could answer this please 🙂

[Suggy]

Thank you so much for your inputs and time @Barry Kant  !!!

[Barry Kant]

Hi Suggy, 

1 thing to add. 
Initially ITSM has Impacted Services/CIs for the output of Impact Analysis. 
Since some releases 2 related lists are added for:

1. (Impacted) Service Offerings
2. (Impacted) Business Applications

This functionality is driven by system properties:

Property	Value	OOTB value	Comments
com.snc.incident.populate_ business_application	TRUE	FALSE	When TRUE the impact analysis will write affectedBusiness Applications in the related list
com.snc.incident.populate_ service_offering	TRUE	FALSE	When TRUE the impact analysis will write affectedService Offerings in the related list
com.snc.change_request.populate_ business_application	TRUE	FALSE	When TRUE the impact analysis will write affectedBusiness Applications in the related list
com.snc.change_request.populate_ service_offering	TRUE	FALSE	When TRUE the impact analysis will write affected Service Offerings in the related list

Property	Value	OOTB value	Comments
com.snc.incident.refresh_ impacted.include_affected_cis	TRUE	FALSE	When TRUE The input for impact analysis is the related list with affected CIs. Also: impact analysis will be done from svc_ci_assoc table (not in cmdb_rel_ci table).   When FALSE the input for impact analysis is the Configuration Item attribute and the impact analysis will be done from cmdb_rel_ci table.
com.snc.change_request. refresh_impacted.include_affected_cis	TRUE	TRUE	When TRUE The input for impact analysis is the related list with affected CIs. Also: impact analysis will be done from svc_ci_assoc table (not in cmdb_rel_ci table).   When FALSE the input for impact analysis is the Configuration Item attribute and the impact analysis will be done from cmdb_rel_ci table.

As subscriptions and Outages are made against Service Offerings this for me is good enough to have as output. Communication can be done accordingly and KPIs in Enterprise Portfolios are calculated against Service Offerings as well. 

If parent Services are needed then just capture the parent in the Service Offerings. 

Note:
When impact analysis is done from svc_ci_assoc table your Application Services needs to be one of those classes:

• Mapped Application Service
• Dynamic Application Service
• Tag Based Application Service

Dynamic CI Groups by the nature of it works similar. 

BR,
Barry

[Suggy]

Thanks Barry.. This is very important to "impact analysis will be done from svc_ci_assoc table (not in cmdb_rel_ci table)."