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

[Mathew Hillyard]

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?

[mcastoe]

I often use these definitions in workshops:

Application [cmdb_ci_appl] - a software title installed and running on a server. It is electronically discoverable; i.e. Discovery will find it if configured to do so.  You can login and shut it down; it is physical

Application Service [cmdb_ci_service_whatever...] - an interconnected stack of Application, Servers and other operational CIs connected and working together as a "deployment of an enterprise system".  Also, top down, a deployment of a Business Application. This is a logical "collection"

Business Application - the abstract representation of an enterprise system used to represent all deployments of said enterprise system fro design and strategic planning purpose.  

hope this helps

[Barry Kant]

the indicator is using the business_application attribute of the task table. (legacy)
There are new functions to analysis the impact to business applications. These function can be controlled by system properties:
com.snc.incident.populate_business_application
com.snc.change_request.populate_business_application

so like impacted services (offerings) it will also roll up the impact to business applications per incident/change for every downstream related CI. 
This analysis is doing the work correct however this is not part of the indicators. To my knowledge this is the part Doron is referring to as work in progress. 

The legacy business_application attribute does work, but shouldn't be used anymore. (concept wise it is a 1:n not a 1:1).

BR,

Barry

[Mathew Hillyard]

Thanks for the update Barry.

• Can I confirm that the new functions are just for calculating impact and do not work with APM?
• How about Problems? APM considers the indicators Incidents.New, Problems.New and Changes.New
• If the legacy business_application attribute should not be used, what's the alternative? I am in an APM project now and need to implement PA Indicators with APM soon so I need a workable alternative
• In addition to the functionality, the other work in progress aspect is that there's neither product documentation nor NowLearning content about this subject as far as I can see.

[Barry Kant]

Hi Mathew, 

that was indeed our observation. The impact analysis changes/matured, but the output was not consumed by the APM module. 
The impact analysis capability exists for :
Incident
Change
so not for Problem

Technically (not 100% sure) I can imagine that the impact analysis for Incident and Change is taking CI(s) as input to calculate (upstream relations) to identify impacted services/business applications. Where a problem is 1 or more incidents to and you can either:
1 - take all impacts from these incidents OR
2 - take all affected CIs from the incidents and work on the Problem. 

Technically the impact is written in this table:
task_cmdb_ci_business_app
so it will be possible to link problem records to impacted business applications (so for APM solution the approach is a one-off approach). --> this is an improvement to be made. (from a CSDM point of view)
How to consolidate the impact in problem is another question (1 or 2 and I am lacking the knowledge for best choice here). I do know that there is no capability in ITSM right now that automatically does this. My first (instinctive) approach would be to consume all impacted Business Applications from all related Incidents. 

I am not an expert in all these areas it is how I expect the data to be consumed from a CSDM framework. I probably do not have all questions answered. 

BR,

Barry

[fibssy]

Hi,

I ran into the same issue while implementing APM. This is how I approached it (and it seems to be working). If you find any flaws or mistakes in this, please share. I like to learn from you.

In my use case, the Operations team uses the Configuration Item fields on the IPC forms to register records on Application Services. According to the CSDM model, there should be an OOTB relationship between the Business Application & Application Service (consumes::consumes by).

In the Business Application Breakdown Source (which is being used on the A360 dashboard), I have added a new additional Breakdown called: " Business Application via CI". Within this Breakdown, I have added three Breakdown Mappings for IPC. In the breakdown mapping I have added a script to map the Application Service which is populated in the CI field via the Consumes::Consumed by relationship to the related Business Application.

Example for INCIDENT:

To complete this have have added the newly created breakdown to the PA indicator (e.g. Number of open incidents):

After I ran the needed PA jobs I was able to confirm that worked as I hoped for.

Now, if an application serivce is logged in the CI field of the IPC form this indicator counts that as an incident on the related Business Application.

Finally, In the Application Indicator (for APM) I have change the default breakdown.

Fibssy