Refer Business Application as part of Incident management or not?

[Suggy]

ServiceNow here says NOT to refer Business Applications in Incident management process - https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-servicenow-platform/page/product/csdm-implementation/co...

and here ServiceNow again says, you can populate Business Applications as part of your Incident management process - https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-servicenow-platform/page/product/csdm-implementation/ta...

This is driving me nuts. Am I missing something? Is ServiceNow confused or confusing us? 🙂

[Rose LeSage]

My perspective and how I understand the documentation is that you do not use Business Applications in incident management. This means that you will not pick a business application as a configuration item that is having the issue. However, you can see business applications in the related lists for incidents to help you understand the impact of the configuration item that is having the issue. If the configuration item in the incident has a relationship to the business application, you would be able to see that the business application is impacted. 

It is a bit confusing and quite possibly a test by ServiceNow to see if we are paying attention. 🙂

[Suggy]

Hi @Rose LeSage When you say "If the configuration item in the incident has a relationship to the business application, you would be able to see that the business application is impacted."

Can you share more insignts on this? Is that replationship something we gotta manually build? 

and how to populate them on the Incident related list? Manually or how?

[Rose LeSage]

Hi! We manually create the relationship between the business application and the application services. We also manually create relationships between the application and technical services and their servers. 

If you have those relationships established, then you should be able to automatically populate a related list on the incident form with the impacted business applications. The relationship would drive what is in that list. You would not need to manually add the business applications.

[Pat Espin]

The Business Application is a high level representation of the application as a whole but not an actual instance of the application.  It's great for tying all the logical and physical layers of an application together and for business side visibility.  At the incident level, however, we assign the associated Application Service.  For example, your business application may be "Workday" and your application services may be "Workday" (Prod instance), "Workday Stage", and "Workday Test".   At the Incident level you want to assign the application service i.e. "Workday" or "Workday Stage".

A side reason for doing it at Application Service is because that is where automated service mapping starts.