How do I create an application service map with multiple tag service candidates?

JeffE
Tera Contributor

Hello, 

 

I am hoping there is a way to do this. I have an application that runs in AWS. We are currently in the process of standardizing our tagging but we still have different tags representing the same application. How do I relate multiple service candidates to the same application service instead of having each tag variant be it's own separate map? 

 

Example: 

AWS currently tagged with app1, app 1, app-1. All these tags represent the same application but it will currently create three separate tags based application services. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Thanks, 

Jeff

4 REPLIES 4

James Hammond
Giga Guru

Hi @JeffE 

Sounds like a bit of a complicated situation, are you using the tag based mapping feature through Service Mapping?  If so, it would be good to see how the Tag Categories have been setup?

Tag Governance is one of the areas that is not always standardised, so it's good you're going through the process to standardise.

Hi @James Hammond ,

 

I have two tag categories: Application and Environment. For Application, I have variations of the app tag, which include application, app, app-name. For Environment, I have variations such as env and environment. In the tag-based service family, I have the Application tag category one and the Environment tag category at two.

 

From the example above, these would all create separate service candidates even if the environment tag didn't have any variation:

KeyValueService candidate
appapp1app1::prd
applicationapp 1app 1::prd
appapp-1app-1::prd

 

What would be nice is if I can create a service map and select multiple service candidates to populate the map instead of them being separate. If I go through and create a tag-based map by manually inputting the key-value pairs, that works to an extent, but I am limited to three key-value pairs.

 

I hope this helps explain it a little more.

 

Thanks,

Jeff

dzmitryKon
Tera Contributor

Hi,
i don't think what you are describing is available OOTB.  And from me experience violates 2 things:

  1. The whole idea of Tag-Based Service Mapping is to map based on "unique combination of Unique values" based on your tag families. Where in your case different tag values "mean" the same service.
  2. Secondary, its always better to fix/clear data first, to make it reliable, before trying to fix it at ServiceNow side. 

However, if its not feasible to clear/normalise data in a first place (which i would strongly recommend), i believe you can add custom "normalisation" process for your tags. By creating and maintaining in service now a table of "tag value families" which "do mean the same services" and on every tag insert/update/per-schedule to update all values from the family to the same value, or even better to set "common" value for "normalised app" tag, created directly in ServiceNow.

 

Sounds like light/non-impactfull customisation to update data before picked up by tag-based mapping. with the extra work to maintain this mapping as a part of change/new service onboarding. So i strongly recommend to push for data quality.

Alternatively you can always create a manual App service, combining app1::prd, app 1::prd, app-1::prd. Should be good enough for event management/impact assessment.

Thanks,
Dzmitry

can we map the business application to a taxonomy nodes in a bulk way instead mapping each business application seperately? in a business application table can we update in a bulk in alist view or something?