Question on how to report on Incidents/Changes per Business App, using CSDM

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Hi All,

I know that Enterprise Architecture workspace comes with indicators and app profiles for measuring technological debt and number of incidents etc. My question is, aside from the EA, what are some best practices to be able to report on ICP tickets from the perspective of Business Apps?

Since Business Apps are not normally used in those ICP processes as operational CI, what we have instead is Application Services. Those are linked to Business Apps via CMDB Relationships. Is there a way to leverage those relationships to build standard or Performance Analytics reports? Or would this typically involve populating a reference to Business app on the tickets? There's an OOTB Business App field available, I just believe it is not common practice to do so? 

So my question is, has anyone got a good example on how to use Business App attributes for ICP reporting outside of EA? I am looking into CMDB Query Builder, but not sure yet if this can help to leverage some of standard / PA reporting capabilities. I would like to avoid creating additional database views or custom tables for the sake of such reporting...

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

[Barry Kant · Accepted solution]

Hi Tom, 

an alternative could be to activate the impact service business application properties for incident and change mgmt. (default = FALSE)
- com.snc.incident.populate_business_application

- com.snc.change_request.populate_business_application

If these properties are set to TRUE, the refresh impacted services action in incident and change will populate impacted Business Applications in the task_cmdb_ci_business_app table.

Note:
This is based on the:
configuration item in the incident record or the affected CIs related list in the change record. Looking upstream in the cmdb_rel_ci table and/or the svc_ci_assoc table to find impacted Application Services. A separate function will lookup the parent Business Applications of the impacted Application Services and list them in this table. 
It should be seen as suggested/potential impacted based on the CI input.

In an incident/change the impact can be multiple Business Applications, so an attribute field will not work in my opinion. 
Real impact should be captured by outages Application Services or Service Offerings for availability commitments. 
So, alternative you can report on the outage table for real impact (full, or degradation), but no directly to Business Application level.

BR,
Barry

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

This is great. Thanks a ton @Barry Kant! I will wait a bit more to see if anyone else has some experience with similar reporting to add to the pool of ideas and then will mark as accepted 🙂

I was looking at the impacted Business Applications related lists in my PDI and wondering why nothing happens when I select an App Service... must have been due to those properties you mentioned.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @Tom Sienkiewicz 

Once you have CSDM service maps populated with the correct relationship types, then you activate the Incident and Change properties @Barry Kant mentions above, and added the Impacted Business Applications related list to the Incident and Change forms, then the Impacted Business Applications related lists (which is just the Impacted Business Application [task_cmdb_ci_business_app] table) will become populated. Note this does not apply to the Problem table - you can add the related list but it will never be populated (there is no option to populate it inside the Problem Properties module). However it's pretty easy to replicate the functionality if required. In fact to get the Indicators working in Enterprise Architecture you have to as one of the Indicators is for Impacted Business Applications related to Problems 😉

In terms of reporting, you can just report on the Impacted Business Application table as it contains both the Task and the Business Application. If you want to report across the CMDB you can report on the CI Relationship table between Business Application and Application Service with the appropriate filters. The EA app has pre-built CMDB Query Builder queries which you can also generate reports on.

As always with reporting - what do you want to show?

I Hope this helps,

Mat