See how my Business Application is performing

[Henrik Jutterst]

Quick question:

What is the OOB way for me as a Business Application owner to see how my Business Application(s) are performing.

For example: When we create an incident and add Service Offering to the incident.

The Service Offering is related to a Service Instance and the Service Instance is related to the Business Application.

What out-of-box are there to see how my Business Application and/or Service Instance is performing?

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi  @Henrik Jutterst 

1. Ensure your services are mapped properly (you indicate you have this already)
2. Visit Incident > Administration > Properties and turn on the properties to calculate impacted services from affected CIs, impacted Service Offerings and Impacted Business Applications (the fourth property toggles whether to refresh impacted services synchronously, or async, or via events).
3. Add the Service Offerings and Impacted Business Applications related lists to the Incident form (and I recommend you re-label Service Offerings to Impacted Service Offerings for consistency)
4. This step is not mandatory but makes for a much cleaner and easier user experience. You can choose to do this in other ways - e.g. start with the Service field, but the takeaway is to auto populate or filter reference fields wherever you can.
   1. Set up the Incident form so that populating a CI filters the Service offering field to only those Service Offerings that are connected to that CI, make the Service Offering field mandatory on create/update, and set up the Service field to be auto-populated by the Service offering field (every Service Offering has a single mandatory Parent service), and make the Service field read only. 
   2. Filter the Configuration item field when a Service offering is entered to show only those CIs that are connected to that Service offering.
5. Fix the OOTB defect where Service Offerings are not calculated properly (see https://www.servicenow.com/community/common-service-data-model/refresh-impacted-services-improved-ou...).
6. Create an Incident, populate a Configuration Item in the configuration item field, and ensure the Service offering and Service fields are populated with the related records.
7. Right-click the banner and select "Refresh impacted services". This is a pain, no-one remembers to do this manually so create some logic to do it automatically - I've seen a Business Rule running on insert/update of the Incident or on insert/delete of an Affected CI as the possibilities.
8. You should then find Business/Technology Management Service on the form, and related Service Instances will be in Impacted Services, Service Offering on the form and related Service Offerings in Impacted Service Offerings, and Business Applications in Impacted Business Applications.

If you have Enterprise Architecture, then Impacted Business Applications is used OOTB for application scoring - once the above is in place for Incident and Change (and if you want it on Problem you have to replicate what's on Incident as you don't get impacted services automatically), then this will be reflected in application scoring.

With the exception of the Incident properties and the Refresh impacted services context menu item, you get nothing else from ServiceNow in terms of baseline CSDM-compliant config. So you will need to build it yourself to get the most value.

I hope this helps!

Mat