Tracking SLO data on Business Applications

[MEBoatman]

I am the process lead for Application Portfolio Management in our organization. We use ServiceNow's EA module to track our inventory, certify the business application metadata, assess the health of the business applications, etc. Recently I was approached for input on where we might store Service Level Objective information about our business applications. Specifically, they want to gather and store the following information:

1. Regular business hours
2. Non-regular business hours
3. Maintenance window
4. Uptime / Availability percentage

I am looking for input / direction on where we should store this kind of information as it relates the business applications in EA.

[mcastoe · Accepted solution]

Hi @MEBoatman ,

The CSDM prescriptive answer is that these SLO should be defined on the Service Instance (fka Application Service) of the Business Application.   Remember, Business Application is not Operational.  Through is suppose you could argue that the "Intended" business hours, maintenance windows and even the "goal" for Availability.   

I would think that the Regular / Non-Regular Business Hours  as aspects of the Service Offerings that are driven/supported by the Business Application's instances.

SLO is formally managed by the Service Reliability Management app (SRM) and is very OTOM focused. SRM allows you to define the Service Level Indicators (SLI) and then SLOs on critical Services.

Maintenance window is defined in the ITSM Change management capabilities and schedules are assigned to CIs (that'd be operational CIs )

Overall, it seems a tangled web of things and all these different modules but it is quite accurate in reality of representing what happens in the physical world.

Lacking all these modules and the robust model,  I suppose you'd add attributes if not found where you need them.

[MEBoatman]

Thanks @mcastoe !!!! Appreciate you taking the time to respond! This helps a lot!