Specific infrastructure CIs directly consumed by the customers

[Jan Ujcic1]

We have quite a mature automated CMDB that retrieves most of our existing infrastructure items. We're now trying to map the consume/sell domain where we are encountering challenges.

Many of our CIs are actually directly published to our customers. An example of a CI that is directly consumed by our customers could be a VM or a firewall. The challenge is that these come in many different variants and options and mapping all of these in the business service/business service offerings doesn't seem to fit well in the existing Sell/Consume domain.

My questions are:

• Is there no other option that to just create a business service and business service offering for each type of VM available to the customer? Not sure if it is even feasible to connect those to the underlying CIs since there are other systems used for managing them.
• Would it be better to use the Technical Service Offering for this even though the end-user potentially external?

Did anyone find any useful materials on this topic or has first-hand experience in mapping the CSDM domains for a similar use-case?

[TheJoeDC]

The 5 whitepaper says the Business Service Offerings are stratify the Business service by availability/scope/pricing. So that might make sense if you had different offerings by those criteria. 

So if you think about the chain:

Business Capability - "Managing security" ->

Business Service - "Firewall management" ->

Business Service Offering - 8x5 or 24x7

One thought might be to use the Product Models out of foundation element, linking each CI (model_id attribute). They would tie in across both the Business and Technical offerings with features.