Need advice on implementing outage

HugoFirst · ‎02-11-2015

We are in the process of implementing the outage module. The purpose of this is to provide the outage information so we can use it in a Service Availability page.

I'm new to this and I'd like some "big picture" advice. How important is the "Service Portfolio Management" plugin and the "Service Portfolio Management - SLA Commitments" plugin?

I activated the "Task Outage Relationship" and Service Portfolio Management" plugins. And I read the docs on Outage and Service Portfolio Management, but things are not coming together as I expected.

I created an outage against a Service Office. And while the outage appears under the "Service Availability" tab, the variables for "Total Downtime" and "Total Outages" are all zeroes for Service Availability for that Service.

So I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has trod this path successfully.

HugoFirst · ‎02-13-2015

FWIW - I had some success today and I want to describe the steps I took to make things happen.

Here's some reference pointer that got me started:

Service Offerings - ServiceNow Wiki

ITIL Availability Management - ServiceNow Wiki

Service Portfolio Management - ServiceNow Wiki (for advice on setting up Service Offerings)

My goal: to get a service availability chart

Steps I took:

1. Enabled the Task Outage Relationship plugin.

( Service Portfolio was already activated. So I don't know if this was required, but I thought I'd mention it.)

2. Create a Service Offering. Fields I filled in were Location, Parent, Price Model and Price, . Operational status was left at Operational. Let's call the Service Offering "SO-1".

3. In "SO-1"'s Service Commitments tab, I create a new Service Commitment. I filled in the fields of Type=Availability, Schedule=8-5 Weekdays, Breach Penalty amount = 20.00, Per=Hour, Breach Penalty time = 10 min.

4. Now I can create an outage record. I did this from an incident.

Make sure the "Configuration Item" field is the service offering, "SO-1" in this case.

Set the begin and end and short description. Type = "Outage". Save the record and observe that the duration is calculated from the begin and end fields.

5. Now view the Service Offering, SO-1, You'll see the availaibility chart and it should reflect the outage you just created.

6. On the Service Availability tab, note that there are many entries. Initially there were 480 for me. These represent various dates and timeframes. The ones which match your outage record will show the downtime and availability.

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret all this yet. But at least I'm getting some results now.

aharper00 · ‎02-25-2016

Resurrecting an old thread but I'm doing something similar and have some questions. Quick high level for where I am...

Business Service is just that... high level business service like Finance or Accounts Payable. The next level down is the Service Offering. So under Accounts Payable you may have a Service Offering of "payroll" and several other things. The place where you are headed makes sense... an Incident has the CI set for the Service Offering and you then raise an outage against it. Simple enough. I'm looking for a little different of a path.

I have various applications that are used by many Service Offerings. CRM, for instance, is used by about 20 Service Offerings. When we have incidents we get them from end users. Generally I'm hearing that an application is down like CRM. Lets say I have 100 incidents... they will have different CI's depending on who is reporting them... their computer, the application, etc. At that point nobody knows what the problem is and that's fine. So I now create a parent Incident with a Priority 1 and attach the lower priority user incidents to the parent as children. The parent's CI is the application that is down... CRM. I will create an outage against the application and want the tool to be smart enough to know that my Availability for 20 Service Offerings has been affected. I don't want to have to set 20 Service Offering CI's to my parent incident.

Any idea how to do this???? I have relationships setup between the Application and Service Offerings but am not able to get things working as I hoped. Thanks.

Eric M · ‎05-16-2016

Did you have any success on this model? I'm looking for something similar with getting Application CI to map availability up to the Service/Offering chain. I'm thinking Performance analytic maybe able to help with the data reporting.

Eric

francosuozzo_pe · ‎09-04-2017

Hello,

did any anyone obtain a final result about this question?

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

Franco