CSDM & Request Catalog - service offering and catalog item association

[VenniMakarainen]

Disclaimer

Any statements, opinions and remarks made by me in this community post are personal. As such, they do not represent any official stand of my employer. The text here reflects my personal experience working nearly 11 years in the ServiceNow ecosystem as a partner, customer, and now as a ServiceNow employee. I draw on the insights of all the smart people I have had the pleasure to work with during my professional career.

Introduction

In this article, I'll briefly address:

• what CSDM states about request catalog (service offering and catalog item association)?
• what are high-level practicalities around service offering and catalog item association?
• How Digital Portfolio Management affects service offering-catalog item association when activated?
• how user criteria fit the scene?

CSDM - service offerings, catalog items and service subscriptions

Let's briefly acknowledge a few things from the official CSDM material. Note, here the term service catalog can be seen as a synonym for request catalog. Service Catalog is a platform capability used to provide self-service opportunities across ServiceNow products:

I'll highlight the following from the official material available on product docs and on Now Create:

• Service Offerings can be related to catalog items using the Available for Subscribers [sc_cat_item_subscribe_mtom] table:
  • Related list Available for subscribers on catalog item form
  • Related list Items orderable by subscribers on service offering form
    
    
• Subscribers (i.e. users) can be related to Service Offerings via Service Subscriptions by ** tables:
  • By Group [service_subscribe_sys_user_grp]
  • By Location [service_subscribe_location]
  • By Department [service_subscribe_department]
  • By User [service_subscribe_sys_user]
  • By Company [service_subscribe_company]

What do these service subscriptions mean in practice?

Below is an illustrative data model around service subscriptions:

I'll  note the following considerations around service subscriptions:

• Foundation data is leading
  • avoid direct user-to-service offering association for better manageability
  • data quality leads your options
  • generally, a service is offered to an organizational entity rather than directly to specific individuals
    
    
• Only catalog items of type catalog item, product catalog item, hardware catalog item, software catalog item and record producer can be associated with a service offering
  
  
• No restrictions on establishing service offering <-> catalog item relationships
  
  
• Business units cannot be used for service subscriptions
  
  
• Service offering <-> catalog item <-> service subscription connection drives visibility to a particular catalog item

How does Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) affect service subscriptions?

DPM activation changes the association options as shown in the illustration below:

One of the reasons for this restriction is to ensure documented service performance reporting.  This includes tracking how many requests have been created for a particular service offering, i.e. the consumption of that service. The restriction dates back to legacy premium Service Portfolio Management capabilities before the release of DPM. The restriction applies also in the latest Yokohama release.

So, what about user criteria?

In short, more than likely still needed. From a functional perspective, visibility to a particular catalog item is described by the following scenarios. These scenarios include utilizing the Available for Subscribers [sc_cat_item_subscribe_mtom] table while accessing a catalog item as a regular "Joe Employee".

For clarification, additional scenarios have been left out in purpose from this article. This includes both user criteria applied at a category level in the request catalog as well as deny listing. When deny listing:

• it possible to deny visibility from users that meet predefined conditions such as having a specific role
• it is possible to deny visibility from a service offering using the Not Available for Subscribers [sc_cat_item_subscribe_no_mtom] table

I prefer leveraging allow listed visibility. This informs more explicitly who can submit a certain catalog item or access a certain catalog category. Complex visibility rules can fairly easily result in scenarios where a user actually cannot see a catalog item although they should.

Ending words

Thanks for reading! I hope you found the article useful. If so, please mark this article as helpful. 

I'll close the article with the following takeaways:

• CSDM alone does not provide details concerning a certain product and/or feature; it is essentially a framework - always consult the latest product documentation
  
  
• Digital Portfolio Management changes the behavior around service offering <-> catalog item association, from many-to-many to one-to-many
  
  
• Service offering <-> catalog item relationship driven visibility is data management, user criteria rules are technical configuration
  
  
• Foundation data supports both service subscriptions as well as reusable user criteria rules

[Eric Bello]

Thanks Venni for the insightful article!

Two follow-up questions (as newbie)

1. When looking at subscription related list, I can only see Users (not Companies related list). Do you confirm that I need to have SPM baseline plugin installed (hopefully free of charge)?

2. How easy to enforce 1:N relationship between Service offering <> catalog item using a business rule?

[mikkojuola]

Hi Eric,

For Q1: those relationships are available "in the background", but you may have to add them to your form layout as "Related lists".

For Q2: In case you are interested in "how to enforce data models" in general, I'm happy to have a call on the topic.

In this context for example, you can use our DCM application to create a "blueprint" out of the data model represented by Venni. And then run an audit against the visual data model. No scripting, no custom reports or other configs. Just create a blueprint and run an audit against it.

Example blueprint

One view to reporting "data compliance"

Best regards,

--Mikko

[VenniMakarainen]

Thanks for comments Eric and Mikko. I'll add a couple short notes as well.

1. The baseline SPM plugins are shipped with the baseline platform. All the subscriber options are visible using the Service Portfolio view on service offering form. Of course, you'd likely want to add these lists to other views as well if missing like Mikko suggested.


2. I would not establish any 1 (service offering) : n ( catalog item) relationship enforcing logic. For example

• the life cycle of the service dictates whether it can (should) include any catalog items
• you need to consider the subscriber data and whether that is valid (e.g. subscribing a group which does not contain any members)
• what if the service only contains record producers to consume it? Record producers cannot be associated to a service

The service owner/responsible should manage this. I also would go for guiding, instructing and auditing the data. The first thing would not be to setup enforcing rule for the association in my opinion.

[VenniMakarainen]

Thanks for comments Eric and Mikko. I'll add a couple short notes as well.

1. The baseline SPM plugins are shipped with the baseline platform. All the subscriber options are visible using the Service Portfolio view on service offering form. Of course, you'd likely want to add these lists to other views as well if missing like Mikko suggested.


2. I would not establish any 1 (service offering) : n ( catalog item) relationship enforcing logic. For example

• the life cycle of the service dictates whether it can (should) include any catalog items
• you need to consider the subscriber data and whether that is valid (e.g. subscribing a group which does not contain any members)
• what if the service only contains record producers to consume it? Record producers cannot be associated to a service

The service owner/responsible should manage this. I also would go for guiding, instructing and auditing the data. The first thing would not be to setup enforcing rule for the association in my opinion.

[Eric Bello]

Thanks Mikko and Venni. It makes a lot of sense. I think I'll do it the usual way, keeping data consistency through process first... and I'll add ITSM Pro to my Christmas list next year 🙂

[Alec Hanson]

Thanks Venni, this is a very helpful article to explain the subscribed impact on Catalog Items.

Can anyone explain what the Subscribed by related list is when there is already a Subscribed by User related list?

Thanks

Alec

[VenniMakarainen]

Alec,

Subscribed by is a cmdb_ci level list. I.e. it is available to any table that is a child in cmdb_ci table hierarchy.

The other five related lists (referenced in this article) are native to service offerings only. Only Subscribed by User is acknowledged in CSDM.

The 'Subscribed by' list and the underlying cmdb_subscriber table have been available as far as I can remember. However, I cannot identify any actual related baseline configuration. The UI action 'Subscribe' is not associated to it either. Instead, the UI Action relates to subscribing to CI related notifications.

So, I have to admit that I do not know. I do hope our extensive community could help here 🙂

[Jacques Clement]

Thanks Venni it really helps - the differences between:

• The Subscribe UI action (which is about being notified when a CI we subscribed to has been added to the task affected CI related list);
• The Subscribed by related list (I don't know what it does, besides adding an entry to the cmdb_subscriber table);
• And finally the Subscribed by User related list;

have been driving me a little nuts for quite some time. It's a bit clearer now, even though there's clearly too much of the word subscription in ServiceNow. If you go to a sys_user record, you'll also find a "Subscription" related list that is about... the license subscriptions.

Thanks.

[Jacques Clement]

Maybe one thing to add to the User Criteria discussion: as far as I understand, service offering subscriptions only work against individual catalog items, whereas user criteria can be defined at the item, category and catalog levels, thus offering more flexibility. Am I getting this right?

[Jiri Skala]

Hi Jacques,

Yes, you are partially right:

• service offering subscriptions only work against individual catalog items,
• user criteria can be used for catalog items and categories but not for the whole catalog.

Regards

Jiri

[Jacques Clement]

You're right, thanks for correcting this.

[mikkojuola]

We agreed to do a webinar related to this topic and it's already next week!

Please join me and Venni on Tuesday 30th of November to hear about "CSDM 4.0 Examples for a Data-Driven Portal". Registation is open here.

[Marcel Leu]

Hi Venni

We are implementing the csdm model on going. Now, we are between the run and fly stage. So we would like to connect catalog items to the Business Service Offerings.

In further future, we are going to report the subscribers and we'll generate expense lines to push that to our finacial system.

But now, i understand that the subscriber options are only for visualization functions. And this is an additional way to configure for who is the catalog item available in the catalog (in addition to the user criteria).

What i am trying to establish is this:

• The Catalog item is available
• Consumer orders the item
• I see which person ordered it and uses the service (subscriber)
• I can read the quantity of who is consuming a service and generate an expense accordingly

It would be fine to have any hints in which direction i should go.

Marcel

[VenniMakarainen]

Hey Marcel and thanks for the comment,

You could think this article as the technical view on the associations where data driven visibility is applied. Of course, this visibility is not the only use case for having subscribers and you are referencing to another: financials.

Subscriptions can be used for things like:

- communications: should you have a business impacting service degradations, subscriptions may be leveraged for targeted communication
- financials: pricing model for a realised service (aka offering), you could take a look at our service builder app: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-it-service-management/page/product/service-builder/task/create-edit-service-offering.html
- personalised experience: subscriptions can be used to limit the available offerings for users on various forms, not just for catalog item visibility

On general terms, service consumption may not directly affect its pricing. Certain services may well be fixed price; e.g. having an infrastructure asset with preconfigured options while the monthly cost could be then fixed according the desired options.

Additionally, you may want to review contract management and expense line related documentation:
- https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-it-asset-management/page/product/contract-management/concept/c_UseContractManagement.html

- https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-it-service-management/page/product/asset-and-configuration/concept/c_ExpenseLine.html

[Jiri Skala]

Hi Marcel,

I think all your requirements are simply achievable using OOTB SN platform capabilities. You want to establish four elements:

1. The Catalog item is available =
   • You must ensure your catalog items have filled in the Price attribute
   • The catalog item availability will be controlled by either User criteria or Service Offering subscription
2. Consumer orders the item = you must create a business rule for the [sc_req_item] table that will insert a new Expense line record when a requester orders the catalog item. You can be inspired by OOTB BR Create Expense Line for the [alm_asset] table. The BR must ensure that the Expense line record contains, among others, the filled-in attributes:
   • User = the original requester who ordered the item,
   • Task = the ordered Catalog item,
   • Amount = the Price of the ordered Catalog item.
3. I see which person ordered it and uses the service (subscriber) = you will achieve this by a report on the Expense line table where Task.Task Type = Requested item. You will see exactly who ordered which catalog item for which price in the User, Task, and Price columns.
4. I can read the quantity of who is consuming a service and generate an expense accordingly = this information is already available from the above report.

Regards

Jiri

[Mary Vanatta1]

Could you post an update in relation to Digital Portfolio Management? Is it stay the same as what we see with Service Operator Workspace (not to be confused with Service Operations Workspace)

[Jacques Clement]

Not exactly the subject of this post, but I believe Service Operations Workspace ultimately should replace the Operator Workspace; both personas (Service Agent and Operator Agent) are meant to be addressed by Service Operations Workspace.

[VenniMakarainen]

Thanks, I did a quick update on the section in question. The restriction is the same with Digital Portfolio Management which replaces the to-be deprecated Service Owner Workspace.

[VenniMakarainen]

Yep, Service Operations Workspace does not directly play a role in the matter discussed in this article.

[CMDB Whisperer]

One important point not mentioned here (and I had to test this out myself to be clear on how it works in practice) is that, although the subscription methods laid out here -- Company, Department, Location, Group -- support hierarchical relationships, and although the use of these parent-child hierarchies are considered "leading practice"  the current behavior of the SPMSubscriptionUtils script does not include hierarchical relationships, which means subscriptions are not recursive.  So if I have a Service Offering that is available to the Development department but there are multiple child departments within Development, I can't simply subscribe Development.  I have to subscribe each individual sub-Department and sub-sub-Department.  Likewise with Locations.  If I have an offering that is available to a specific country or region, and I follow the leading practice of managing hierarchical locations at the Region/Country, State, City, Site, Building, Floor, and Room, I can't just simply subscribe the entire Region to the offering; I have to include every individual descendant node in the Location hierarchy for that Region.  This is a logistical nightmare.  There should be an option to look at the hierarchical relationships for this data.  Worth noting that this is just one of many cases where hierarchical relationships in foundational data is ignored by the platform.  There needs to be better support for hierarchical operations across the board, and especially with these Foundation Data elements!

Another minor but important point is that when you change the subscriptions you will need to clear the cache if you want to see the visibility state change immediately, e.g. for testing purposes.  Trying this out on my own I was led to some false conclusions of how it was working based on the fact that the page state was showing the previous visibility state after I made a change.

[Ihor Kochetkov]

As I understood User Criteria take precedence. So if I would like to use Service Offering Subscriptions, I need to remove ALL user criteria, in my case it's not possible, I can't find a way to get rid of SNC External in Not Available For in my Catalog Item. 

[CMDB Whisperer]

My understanding was that the the Subscriptions are logically ORed together, along with the Available For user criteria and then the Not Available For user criteria is subtracted from that set of users, so if you are included in the Subscriptions and/or the Available For user criteria then you have visibility, as long as you are not also in the Not Available For user criteria.  If that is not the case then I need to go back to the drawing board on a couple of cases.

[Ihor Kochetkov]

@CMDB Whisperer I'm using an external user (customer, not part of Mobiz company on screenshot) for my test.

Currently, I removed everything from the Catalog Item in "Not Available For" tab and put user criteria which does not match my external user (so he is not getting access by user criteria, but also nothing is preventing his access (if I don't have any user criteria in "Not Available For" section, right?)

And I have Service Offering, which includes this catalog item "Request Computing Hardware". 

But in the end, this external user is not getting access to this catalog item (on screenshot I tried direct link as well)

In User Criteria Diagnostics I can see that he is not passing validation for this catalog item (here I assume our Service Offering should jump in and allow access, but it does not)

[CMDB Whisperer]

@Ihor Kochetkov did you try flushing both the Server cache and the Browser cache?  When testing changes to visibility of catalog items I have found that flushing both caches is required after every change, and I have lost several hours due to false assumptions and conclusions due to not flushing the cache.  

[CMDB Whisperer]

@VenniMakarainen can you provide any authoritative information about whether and how Subscriptions and User Criteria may be used in conjunction?

[Ihor Kochetkov]

@CMDB Whisperer huge thanks for pointing to the cache. After I did clean up, it started to work as explained in this schema (taken from - https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0964556) :

So what I did:

Added "Nobody" active criteria (scripted criteria with answer=false) to my catalog item:

When looking into User Criteria Diagnostics it says I don't have access:

However, here, the Subscription started to work (AFTER CACHE IS CLEARED (cache.do), BROWSER CACHE CLEARED, IMPERSONATION RESTARTED) and the user can see this item then 🙂 

[CMDB Whisperer]

@Ihor Kochetkov glad it worked (and that I don't have to rethink my cases!)  The caching behavior is very problematic.  I know there were some caching improvements in Vancouver, but not sure if this behavior was affected.  Haven't tried this on Vancouver yet.

[VenniMakarainen]

@CMDB Whisperer re: "can you provide any authoritative information about whether and how Subscriptions and User Criteria may be used in conjunction?" 

--> I do not have any additional sources to provide, unfortunately. @Ihor Kochetkov - many thanks for linking that knowledge article that combines both worlds of user criteria and subscriptions.

And yes - instance cache has made me bang my head against my keyboard in the past quite a few times. Not just around cat item visibility. Besides, instance cache, one can find themselves lost with user criteria & subscriptions if various visibility options are used at the same time. Been there too.

[YenGar]

Hi all, I would love your input on this question: 

We currently have just catalog items set up in a catalog. These are not tied to a Service Offering. We are trying to structure a way that makes it easier to track changes to catalog items. It has been proposed before to add an entry in a CMDB table for the catalog items defined in our catalog so that we can add relationships of other catalog items that may be affected by changes made (for example, a change to a table being referenced in a variable used in a catalog item that may affect another catalog item... does that make sense?). Creating a CI record in the CMDB for the catalog item will allow it to be used as the Configuration item in the Change Request and therefore attach other CIs that would be affected by this change so we can have that visibility. 

I am thinking a better approach would be to start using Service Offerings and use that as the CI in change records and display all the related catalog items to it to see what would be affected? In reality, the Service Offering is not the record actually changing, it would be whatever catalog item needs updating so maybe having a 1:1 between the offering and catalog item? 

I'm a bit stuck on how to approach this if it's even possible with using the OOB functionality... any suggestions, ideas, different approaches/perspectives are really appreciated.

Thank you!

[Mary Vanatta1]

Please review the Now Create content around Product Models, a CI, i should have the Model ID attribute on the CI record.  The model (version) might be related to a Hardware model, Software model etc.  So if you have a service offering for say a laptop IBM Thinkpad 15  and another one for a Mac laptop, those should have a Model ID attributed to a particular model.  

Log in with your ServiceNow ID to https://learning.servicenow.com/now create, after MFA if you are redirected to NowLearning please append URL to 
https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/nowcreate?id=nc_asset&asset_id=293ea29c4721b110db63fb25126d43f4&n...

[Community Alums]

Hi Guys, 

I hope you're well!

How do you include service offers in vendor?

[Amy Matsuhashi]

Hi there!

How do you link Knowledge articles to Service Offerings? 

In the service Offerings form there is a related list called Knowledge but I'm unable to edit it. Also, on the knowledge article form there isn't a related list I could add that says service offerings. 

How do I keep track of the knowledge articles along with the catalog items related to my service? 

Thanks!

[VenniMakarainen]

Hi @Amy Matsuhashi ! I would like to suggest you open a new thread/topic regarding the knowledge article linkage. This ensures better visibility for the wider community to comment and discuss while keeping the scope of this article intact. Thank you so much.

[Kieran Anson]

How are others overcoming the limitation of a catalog item and service offering having a 1-to-1 relationship? Not only does it mean a service offering is limited to either an incident or a request, you wouldn't be able to design simple catalog items to break down the "types" of requests the business might have.

[Mary Vanatta1]

@Kieran Anson  A catalog item can be associated with one or more service offerings, allowing the service offering to act as a "storefront" for the catalog item.
Per docs site: "With the service_editor role, you can add, change, and remove catalog items associated with an owned service offering via the Service Offering form Catalog Item related list. You can also create a catalog item from a service offering via Service Owner Workspace by clicking the Create Catalog Item link. A single service offering may have many related catalog items. Click the Link button in the Catalog Item related list to make a change."

[Kieran Anson]

@Mary Vanatta1 thank you for your help. Looks like I was misunderstanding the business rule 'Validate new Offering Catalog relation' which has a comment only allowing a 1:1 relationship. 

Appreciate the clarity 💛

[RahulKJain]

Thank you @VenniMakarainen for such an insightful blog!

I have got an instance recently upgraded to Yokohama. 
There's a catalog item where
1."Available for" is empty
2."Not available for" is SNC External.
3. "Available for subscribers" - there two service offerings associated.
Within both the service offering under "Subscribed by user" a user is added.

However, still user is not able to access the catalog item.
Which is accessible in instances still on Xanadu.

I have tried having only one service offering associated and also tried clearing Cache but no luck. @CMDB Whisperer @Kieran Anson . Any help around it would be much appreciated. Thank you

[Brian Lancaster]

Does using the below limit who can see the Catalog Item?

• Related list Available for subscribers on catalog item form
• Related list Items orderable by subscribers on service offering form

[VenniMakarainen]

@Brian Lancaster - yes, both of the rel lists point to the same table: [sc_cat_item_subscribe_mtom]. Please, be mindful of the potential User Criteria applied to the item in conjunction as both being evaluated. I encourage you try out in action! 🙂

[Brian Lancaster]

Ok so what I'm looking for is a way to associate the CIs so I can use them to pull the approvers. Not limit who can have access to the Catalog item.

[Angelique1]

@Kieran Anson 

I am running into the same issue of only being allowed to do a 1:1 relationship of catalog item to service offering.  Did you need to update or remove a business rule to allow the mapping of a catalog item to multiple service offerings?