How should DPM reflect lower-level CI relationships and incidents

[alexandernordbo]

Hi everyone

I’m currently building out Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) and aligning it with CMDB and CSDM in a cloud-provider context.
I’d like to confirm if my approach makes sense and how others handle visibility of incidents across CI hierarchies.

Current setup

We deliver cloud-based, instance-specific services — similar to how ServiceNow hosts customer instances.
The goal is to give Service Owners and Application Owners a single workspace to view what’s happening operationally (incidents, changes, problems) across all instances.

Here’s the hierarchy I’ve implemented:

Business Application → Business Service → Calculated Application Service → Database Instance

• Business Application: represents the software platform developed in-house.
• Business Service: represents the delivered service offered to customers (in a Service Portfolio).
• Service Offering: one “Production” offering for now (test phase).
• Calculated Application Services: imported automatically from a CI/CD system (each representing a customer-specific deployed instance).
• Database Instances: the underlying infrastructure components supporting each application service.

Relationships are defined in cmdb_rel_ci:

• Business Application → realized by → Business Service
• Business Service → depends on → Calculated Application Service
• Calculated Application Service → depends on → Database Instance

Question

When a Calculated Application Service has a P1 (critical) incident assigned —
should this be visible in Digital Portfolio Management → Enterprise Portfolios → Service Portfolios?

I’ve assigned the incident to the Service Offering and referenced the Business Service.
However, most operational tasks and incidents will live at the calculated application service (instance) level.

So I’m wondering:

Does DPM automatically reflect these lower-level incidents via cmdb_rel_ci relationships?
Or is this something that requires manual roll-up logic or reporting?

I feel like every single incidents needs to have the correct offering and business service set for it to show in DPM. I can probably auto-populate some using business rules etc, but I am afraid that there will be too much that needs to be filled out for it to show in DPM.

All outages will be reported on the cmdb_ci_service_calculated table. I would love for these to show up in the service portfolio under outages for the business service.

Goal

To make DPM a single view where service and application owners can monitor:

All ongoing incidents, problems, and changes related to their services

Aggregated impact from underlying instance-level or infrastructure CIs

All customer instances are represented as calculated application services, imported from our CI/CD pipeline.
This design seems closest to a CSDM-aligned model without Service Graph or Discovery, but I’d like to confirm if this is a recommended approach.

Looking for input

Does this hierarchy make sense according to CSDM and DPM best practices?

Should incidents on lower-level CIs appear automatically in DPM views?

How are others modeling instance-based or per-customer SaaS deployments?

Any advice for ensuring incident/task visibility rolls up correctly through cmdb_rel_ci relationships?

[alexandernordbo]

updated original post and included outage scenario as a great example of what my goal is.

[Barry Kant]

Hi Alexander,

1 - Service Portfolios relates to Business Services or Technical Services
2 - Enterprise Portfolios related to Business Applications or Application Services

You need availability KPIs to reflect outages (need to link KPI via KPI Groups to eg Service Offerings)
Outages can be created on Application Services, and those will be reflected in the Enterprise Portfolio.
Outages can also be created on Business Offerings, and those will be reflected in the Service Portfolio. 

Normally the Business Offerings includes the KPIs with the consumer (consumer agreements)
In your scenario where customer specific instances might be related to the same Business Offering (in case you use CSM), then the KPIs can be set on the Application Service, but that needs an Enterprise Portfolio to reflect that in DPM.

BR,
Barry