How to set up Application Services for Third Party Hosted and SaaS applications

Tymkar · ‎10-31-2023

Hello,

I have a question about Application Services and Service Mapping for Third Party Hosted and SaaS applications.

The company wants to perform Service Mapping for all of it's Business Applications.

In case of applications installed On Premise or Cloud applications we can use standard top-down discovery or tag-based service mapping.

But how would you approach creation of Application Services for third party hosted and SaaS applications?

Here is an example of third party hosted business application:

We have URL/HTTP entry points for this application, but we won't be able to discover any infrastructure that is maintained by an external vendor.

However, it would be beneficial to create an application service anyway to capture and distinguish between different instances of the application (prod and non-prod).

What type of service mapping would you use in this case?

Should we use tags, dynamic CI groups or manually created application services?

What would be the best approach to capture 3rd party hosted applications?

Tymkar · 3 weeks ago

Some time has passed since I posted this question, and I believe I can now answer it myself. 😉

Based on the CSDM v5 model and CMDB architecture, it is still beneficial to create Service Instance records (formerly called Application Services) for each existing environment in order to efficiently map relationships to Offerings, Services and Business Applications.

In the case of a SaaS product, there may be only one Service Instance, which you could name something like "Service Instance: Global" or "Service Instance: Production."

Most likely, there won't be any underlying infrastructure CIs to connect to the Service Instance record, since the vendor manages the infrastructure and Discovery won't reach it. Because that infrastructure isn't something you configure or manage, it probably won't exist as CIs in your CMDB. Depending on the specific system or tool, there is a slight chance that infrastructure CIs could be imported via a Service Graph Connector or a custom integration, but I wouldn't count on that.