Including Saas/PaaS applications in a Service Map

[SusanWinKY]

Hi all,

Disclaimer: I am new to service mapping and we're just getting started on our service mapping project. 

We, like many companies, have moved a lot of our applications/services to Paas/Saas providers, such as SAP HEC and ServiceNow. We know we can't discover/map the infrastructure for those; however, we'd like to represent those somehow on our service maps. Our theoretical thought is to create multiple maps with a 'placeholder' map that represents the Paas/Saas component. We'd manually create this 'placeholder' and the other multiple maps would be the parts that we own/control -- systems that pass data to/from the Paas/Saas -- that could be discovered. And then we'd connect those multiple maps to the 'placeholder' map.

As an example (perhaps a bad one!), maybe we want to map Incident Management. We handle incidents in ServiceNow, but we also have external systems that feed into Incident Management to create incidents. These may come through integrations, emails, etc. We'd want to map the entire Incident Management service to include all of these components. So, we discover the parts that we can and we create the 'placeholder' application service that represents ServiceNow, and somehow connect all of this together. We might have other maps for Change Management, Event Management, etc. The 'placholder' ServiceNow application service would be connected to all of them. If there is an issue with ServiceNow, we'd know all those other maps would be impacted.

Does this make sense? At this point, this is theortical. And, although my example above may not be the greatest, hopefully you can understand how this might be applied to other Paas/Saas such as SAP HEC, GSX, PowerBI, and others.

If you've done something to handle Paas/Saas in a service map, we'd really appreciate any input you have on how you did it. And let me know if you have any thoughts on this theoretical plan we have for the 'placeholder' maps. Thanks in advance!

[Jay LeVan · Accepted solution]

We do something similar but for us the placeholder is a monitoring endpoint CI which is tied to our synthetic monitoring systems since event management is the primary consumer of the service maps.

[cynlink1]

@SusanWinKY,

Did you implement the 'theoretical plan' describe in this post? I need to do something similar, and I am curious to know if it worked for you. Do you have any tips or lessons learned to share related to using placeholder maps?

Thanks in advance,

Cyn