Can we create Service Maps for SaaS applications?

[504mohammedali]

Hi,

Hope you all doing good.

Could you please let me know if it is possible to do Service Mapping for SaaS or PaaS applications?

1) Need inputs if infra/app services are managed by client

2) Need inputs if infra/app services are managed by 3rd party vendor

Looking forward for your reply.

[rotem1]

There are several solution for such.

There are some integrations for 3rd party vendors (i am aware of dynatrace , i also believe we have such for AppDynamic)

If no such integration exist (yet)

classic top-down discovery will probably be difficult but we can try and edit part of the service as manual

Another completely different approach is tag-based services which may be even a better match : 

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-it-operations-management/page/product/service-mapping/concept/tag-based-mapping.html

In both cases you - unless using discovery - u will need a mechanism (connector ?) that will populate the CMDB with those CI from the SaaS/PaaS/3rd party vendor.

[504mohammedali]

Hi Rotem,

Thanks for your reply and suggestions.

We are implementing Horizontal & Top-Down discovery as well.

In this scenario, Are you recommending to use tag based discovery for discovering SaaS or PaaS applications?

[rotem1]

if the SaaS / PaaS are hard to discover via top down -

tag-based can be a good solution for this.
tag-based strong use cases are such environment (like cloud , Container) which are hard for detailed top-down discovery

[CMDB Whisperer]

Technically I don't know if SaaS is really what tag-based mapping addresses.  Tag-based is more for IaaS, because you are managing the cloud infrastructure that has been deployed for that service and can therefore control the cloud tagging.  SaaS generally refers to external service providers where you do not have visibility to the actual infrastructure behind the service and thus tag-based mapping does not address that use case.