Service Mapping

narendrand
Giga Contributor

Hello Everyone,

I am planning to implement  a service mapping for two business services in initial phase.

May I know, what are all the activities I need to take care of to implement this successfully?


FYI - we have Discovery in place without any issues so we are planning to use the same Mid Server.


Please share your knowledge.


Thanks in Advance!

Regards,

Narendran


10 REPLIES 10

bernyalvarado
Mega Sage

Hi Narendran,



The best advice I can give you is the following:



a) There are two ServiceNow ServiceMapping courses that goes into what's needed to do to plan, design, develop and deploy a Service Mapping project. The first and basic one is called ServiceMapping Fundamentals and the second is called ServiceMapping Implementation which also covers aspects of how to drive a ServiceMapping project.



b) Get some help from experts and folks that have done it before. We at Volteo (www.volteo.com) have done multiple successful ServiceMapping implementations in the past and will be more than happy to help. I'm also a certified trainer and often engage as advisor at the executive level to explain what ServiceMapping is capable of and also to outline the right strategy for a successful implementation, which will vary depending on the customer needs. Anyone who will like to chat more about the help that our team can provide can email me balvarado@volteo.com



ServiceMapping implementations are not simple for multiple reasons, and is best to be trained while also getting expert advise for a successful end.



I hope this helps



Thanks,


Berny


Thanks for your response Berny!




As per my understanding, I need to perform below steps to achieve the successful implementation of Service mapping. Kindly verify the below steps and let me know if I have missed out anything ,




1. Select the business service for which I am going to implement service mapping




2. Get the  Entry point for those Business service from Infra team




3. Configure capabilities on the existing Midserver to get utilised for service mapping




3b. Grant service mapping role to the mid server user profile  




4. Enable plugin by raising HI Ticket




5. Configure Entry point under the business service module




6. Configure IP ranges of IT Components which are helping the service to get up and running




I have few queries here,


1. Do we need to create any schedule for service mapping similar to Discovery?




2. How come we know, what are all the IT components are lies under this business service to configure the IP ranges ? Do we need to get info from Infra team?




Kindly suggest me any other steps need to be included  




Regards,


Narendran


Hi Narendran,



Here goes some observations that hopefully are helpful to each one of the steps you mentioned.



1. The part of the selecting a business service is a whole discussion and often an art to influence the organizations to be Service Oriented. Very often you will see that customers will lead to map applications which will end up in very big problems since the service maps will end up been enormous and to some extend useless since it misses to speak to which part of infrastructure is impacting a given service.



2. Entry points are often given by the Business units that want to track their services.



3. Capabilities, Applications and IP ranges must be configured appropriately for each MID Server.



3b. I don't think this one is true. From my experience and from what the documentation states, you don't need to do anything on the midserver user.



4. Yes. And this should take place in the first steps (even before configuring the MID Server)



5. You first need to create the business service and then enter the associated entry points.



6. Yes. This should take place while configuring the MID Server



------



On your other questions:



1. OOB there's two discovery schedules for ServiceMapping. These are not business service specific. I have created a blog on how to created a scheduled job to schedule the discovery of a specific business service: Scheduling the discovery of a specific business service



2. Indeed. Someone needs to provide the architecture diagram. Often that's a combination of Network, Infrastructure and Application teams. At least that's the case on big organizations.



Oh boy... there's sooo many other steps . I really will recommend you go through the formal training courses and then get some help from an expert. Even if you're a ServiceNow partner, it is ok to ask from help from other ServiceNow partners who have experience on it.



Thanks,


Berny


Berny is so right, do not expect the complete answer from service Mapping and therefore have some architecture diagram beforehand will help. use the inbuilt process in Jakarta as well for ratification (works well) before you publish. Expect for simple mapping at best a day and at worst 2.5 days. For more complex mapping a lot longer. Start with the simple and build experience before tackling anything complex. Education both for the technicians but also the owners on what is a service as that does breed issues if they have a view of what can be mapped to what you can map.