Customers often ask me, "How much time does it take to maintain all these service maps?" Until last week, the answer would vary from customer to customer. Something changed last week when we were working with a customer who wanted to model a sample service. They presented me with a Visio of one of the business services they felt was "typical" for their organization. (I have blurred this out for obvious reasons.)
This diagram contains around 90 elements before you count any of the lines and connectors. In my career, I have had to create and maintain these kinds of diagrams countless times. Some of my best artwork is still hanging on cube walls 5 and 10 years after the original was fresh off the company's big plotter. This is the grown-up IT variant of hanging your paintings on mom's fridge, perhaps.
It is important to note that I am not counting the time it takes to learn how to make discovery patterns. It is a learned skill that takes a few hours of your commitment to understand. That used to be true of Visio, as well, but Microsoft has done a fabulous job of making the user interface ever more intuitive. Recent releases can have amateurs producing useful diagrams pretty quickly, but ServiceNow has also invested in continually lowering the learning curve. Don't be scared, it is worth the journey; and we are making that journey ever shorter.
If you pull up your Discovery Patterns in ServiceNow and pick one, you can get to the Pattern Designer using the "Manage Pattern" button.
Here, we can see the basics of how ServiceNow builds a dynamic map. In Visio terms, we are identifying what boxes and lines to draw.
Let's pick one of the "boxes" — Tibco BW Indentification [SIC] for instance. (Don't judge — English isn't their first language.) Here, we are presented with the knowledge of "why draw this box." What is it that we need to know to draw this in Visio? If we don't know off the top of our head, we can likely look it up. If the knowledge resides with a custom application owner, then they can build the pattern. The time comes from whoever would normally build a static map in Visio: App Owners, Operations staff, Engineering, whoever has the knowledge. If we have them build the Discovery Pattern, then we have not just drawn one box, but we have a box that self-updates and reports on things in the context of ServiceNow! If you know the power of the platform, as we say, then you know that investing the time in creating something on your instance of ServiceNow pays dividends down the road.
Here, we are simply looking for the process name.
The deeper details of Discovery Patterns are beyond the scope of this blog. The example map below shows an automatically generated diagram based on discovered elements and relationships. While I am certain I could use gradient shading and sub-elements to produce a "prettier" static map, the fact remains that Visio only produces a static picture. The map below can respond to alerts and events by highlighting affected elements. It has a timeline that lets us scroll back through the history of the service and all the changed we detected. It can detect unapproved or unplanned changes that may have never caused a human to go back and update their Visio library.
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