CMDB BSM Relationship Best Practices

[toneyvecchio1]

Greetings everyone,

Getting into Discovery + CMDB within my company. Starting relationship building for Business Service Maps and wondering if any standards exist for best practices or examples? Checked Community + Wiki couldn't really find much in that department though I am sure much is circumstantial there must be some best practices.

Things I am currently doing some toying around with are Network Load Balancers, User groups to Business Services, Clustering and DR. Any references or pointers are welcome!

[jesusemelendezm]

Hi Toney, Start top-down with business services, I understand this is the recommended way. Once you have a BS to map then identify what are the CIs that composed that business service so that you can create the relationships between the CIs to the business service.

[meera4]

Hi Tony i have justed started up a new role at my company as Change and configuration manager and looking down the path of building the relationship tree concept and agree with Jesus to work from top layer of business service and way down to contacts

What i have draft the map at this current stage is

Business service -> application -> Workstations -> Infrastructure (network/database/storage)->contact ->location ... also you need to make a detailed look at what level of details you want to drive in relationship tree . Good luck

[KCallaghan]

ServiceNow is a bit vague on defining CI to CI relationships. They do this to let you define it as needed in your enterprise, which may be very different then my own.

Take the time to look at your CIs and decided what you will call those relationships (Uses, Used by, Depends On, Runs on, Member of, Feeds, etc.) Setup examples and either get buy off from other groups or set it in stone and forget it.

We avoided Business Services because we could not get a consensus on definitions. So we stated with Applications and worked down from there to servers, switches, routers, racks, power, databases, etc.

[Larry Youngqui1]

I have a similar, but slightly different question relating to the definition of business services.     We have decided on a small subset of relationships between the business service and the underlying technology components.  

But at a high level, our organization has developed a set of high-level organizational goals and objectives.       I'd like to determine the best practice on how to define and show the relationship between a business service and a business objective.

Defining a "goal" as a service and then creating a relationship from the business service to the goal could be done.     But I don't know if that's the most efficient or reasonable approach.     I don't know if it would affect processes like change impact analysis or other types of reports.     Or, would it negatively impact an operational resource trying to determine a root cause.       At the operational level, that information isn't relevant.

Any ideas on the most optimum way to reflect business objectives?