Business Services High-Level Overview

[cnharris1]

Good morning,

I have taken the CSDM Fundamentals course on the Now Learning platform but still have a few questions. I know that business services are the common names that users in your organization will call something, such as Email, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, and so on. My question is, are these business services (common names) entered in manually under CSDM > Business Service? And if that's the case, where does Service Mapping fit into this process?

Also, can a business service also be a business application or vice versa?

Best regards,

cnharris

[CMDB Whisperer]

Business Services and Technical Services, both of them, represent the valuable outcomes that are delivered to consumers, whether those are technical outcomes or business outcomes.  So these CIs are truly conceptual.  Application Services represent the logical deployed instance of a Business Application (i.e. Dev, Test, Prod, etc.), and each Application Service is basically a container of all of the individual Applications and Infrastructure CIs that are used in that specific instance, and their relationships to one another.  The function of Service Mapping is solely to focus on capturing the makeup of these Application Services.  Most of CSDM really focuses on how these Application Services are then conceptualized into how they are used in to run the Business.

[cnharris1]

Thanks Paul for the information! It's really helpful because I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of this. I know what I can do but I'm trying to go about this process the correct way to prevent any future headaches.

So regarding Business Services, such as email, salesforce, Informatica, and so on, those are entered manually into the cmdb_ci_service table, without Service Mapping?

Service Mapping just focuses on the Application Services, such as what server/database its running on and so on?

The context of what I'm trying to accomplish, at a high-level currently, I'm trying to allow users to submit a change, indicent, or request ticket and allow them to choose what service the ticket is against: 

Mainly for reporting purposes at the moment.

Best regards,

cnharris

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

"Salesforce" and Informatica are not Business Services.  They are Business Applications.  Your Production instance of Salesforce is an Application Service that could be called "Salesforce Production", with an Environment of "Production."  If Salesforce is externally hosted then the dependencies may end there, but if there are internal infrastructure dependencies, those would be part of your Service Map for Salesforce Production.  If you have another non-Production instance of Salesforce then those would be separate Application Services, each with its own infrastructure dependencies, and each relating back up to the Business Application called "Salesforce".  A Business Service could be something like "Salesforce Management" or "Sales Forecasting".  The Business Service is then broken down into one or more Business Service Offerings.  The Offering is the layer where we define the SLA commitments, Availability targets, Operating schedules, RTO/RPO, and relationships to the Service Catalog (i.e. related requestable services e.g. "Remove a Customer Account from Salesforce").  The Offering is also what has that dependency to the Application Service "Salesforce Production".  And yes, the Business/Technical Services and Offerings, as well as the Business Applications are typically created manually or possibly imported from other source of record.

[cnharris1]

Thanks Paul for the clarification!

It seems I have been approaching this process incorrectly and need to go back and revisit a few things. If I have any further questions, do you mind if I reach back out to you?