APM Indicators for Incident, Problem and Change: Business Application Breakdown

Mathew Hillyard · ‎09-06-2022

I have an issue with setting up APM Indicators and collecting data around ITSM records. The APM Indicators related to Incident, Problem and Change (IPC) collect data from existing PA Indicators, for example,

Application Portfolio Management > Application Indicators > Number of Incidents

The Indicator is Number of New Incidents, an existing PA Indicator. When activating APM, a new Breakdown is added to this, based on Business Application (an APM table). So for Incident, for example, the Facts table is incident and the field is cmdb_ci_business_app.

However, This field is neither on any of the IPC forms OOTB, nor does any functionality in the platform appear to populate the Business application field on an IPC record. This means that the Application 360 > Workload tab will display no results.

The APM Implementation NowLearning course states in the section on APM and ITSM integration (I quote)

"In order for base system indicators to work, you should use the application service records when making these associations, NOT the business application records".

I have tried this in a PDI - OOTB nothing on an IPC record will populate the Business application field and the PA collection jobs return no results. If I add the field to the form and enter a Business application manually, then run the PA collection jobs, scores are calculated

I can also find no information about this specific issue within NowLearning, the Community, Developer, Docs or any of the relevant YouTube videos. Am I missing something vital here?

Frank67 · ‎09-06-2022

Can't help sorry, but kudos to you for trying. I think performance analytics is so painful that many people may have given up on it. I find it challenging, onerous, and counter-intuitive, and we just don't have the time to spend continuing to try and get it working the way we would like so unfortunately we don't leverage this part of our licensing and certainly have not embedded it in our business processes. As far as that goes we fall in the bucket identified in the new Gartner ITSM report SN is currently spruiking - they are well out in front as a magic quadrant leader, but one of the cautions Gartner identified is:

Low Value Realization: Given financial pressures caused by COVID-19, in 2020 there was an increase of interactions with Gartner clients that have not yet achieved high levels of I&O maturity and that struggled to demonstrate substantial value from their ServiceNow investments. Without further investment into value realization and ROI, particularly for low-maturity customers using ServiceNow’s base product, there is a higher risk of churn to lower-cost alternatives.

I know that refers to ITSM specifically but for us it applies across the board. I feel that we are a low maturity customer because we don't have half the features we are paying for working either at all or properly. Although we had help getting our base products in we thought we could work out the rest on our own given how many trained people we now have, but things aren't that simple so I just can't see us getting what I would call the value-adds working properly either. We don't have the time and the appetite isn't there. However there is a definite appetite to consider alternatives that are perceived as easier to work with despite the initial time, effort and cost of implementing same. Sorry, gone a bit off topic here, but good luck getting yours going.

mcastoe · ‎10-18-2022

Also, along the lines of what Jen has proposed, consider how the Business Application, through its Application Services, might be associated.

For example, you might count against the Business Application if any of its App Service is identified in incident's:

the Business Service field
The Configuration Item field
listed in the affected CIs
listed in Impacted Services

In each case, consider if you wish to count"against" the Business App. All could be considered valid in understanding a score for operational "issues".

Next, i have also found that in working with customers, it may be helpful to differentiate between P1/Major, P2 incident and below P2 incidents. a count of P1 might carry heavier weight in your scoring. This of course requires additional configuration.

Doron Orbach · ‎09-07-2022

Hi Mathew,

I am sorry to hear about the issues.

Can we set up some time to review the issue?

Thanks,

Doron

Mathew Hillyard · ‎09-08-2022

Thank you Doron, I've contacted you offline.