Dynamic CI Group and Impact Assessment

[Cameron13]

Team,

We know that Dynamic CI group is a new concept, it has benefits and limitations. My question is if we have an application service built by Dynamic CI Group, will it provide us any help in Event Management.

Logically I don't see any logic to use it with Event Management as we can't see the impacted CIs , "Yes" if any CI; part of Dynamic CI group" is down, we can get alerts" and if that is the business need fair enough. But other than that I dont see any value of using dynamic CI for Event management.

Any thoughts?

[CMDB Whisperer · Accepted solution]

Using Dynamic CI Groups should, based on your settings, populated the impacted services of the resulting incident if the CI provided to the incident is part of the DCG.  This provides value from a service owner/consumer visibility perspective.

[Cameron13]

Thanks Paul,

But DCG is simply a list view of application service, I dont think it can calculate the dependency so impacted services ..? Yes if impacted services are part of DCG ..but anything outside wont ? right ?

Let me give you a scenario. CI-X is part of DCG-B and CI-X has relationships with other CIs (ref : cmdb_rel_ci). If we use CI-X for event monitoring and assume child ci of CI-X (which is not part of DCG-B) is down. We wont get any alert. As monitoring is against DCG-B.

[CMDB Whisperer]

Actually as far as I understand it should but it depends on having the right settings.  Dynamic CI Groups are supposed to populate the svc_ci_assoc table in a job (if you have Service Mapping installed, and there may be some other prerequisites as well) and have the setting to use Affected CIs to calculate impacted services, then it will use the svc_ci_assoc table to populate Impacted Services instead of using CIUtil to walk the relationship hierarchy based on your selected Configuration Item on the incident.  Caveat is that I have not verified this end to end, but I had the same question as you do, and brought it to ServiceNow ITOM Health team and this is the answer that was provided to me.

[Mark113]

Hi there,

Did you manage to confirm if DCG shows the impacted services and impact tree in the same way as Application Services?  I'm seeing a different view for DCG and Application Services under Event Management.

Thanks

Mark