Definitions for Affected and Impacted

[hillaryr]

Hello,

This question is really broader than Incident but I had to choose one, so that's my choice of the day.

I am wondering if someone can please provide official definitions for the Affected CI's and the Impacted Services. I'd like to start to use the two related lists on incidents, changes, problem and eventually relate them to outages, but I can't seem to get a clear picture of which is which and why. I'm thinking that there should only be one and only one service that is Affected but could be many that are Impacted.

Here are my (made up) definitions:

Affected: The service or CI that the change/incident/project/problem is happening within. Easy example: We pull a network router out of the wall. The Affected CI is the router, the Client Service is Network Services.

Impacted: Services, CI's that the change will impact. Easy example continued: The router that got pulled enables OnBase, and the mainframe and SAP and others to be accessed. They are all Impacted Services.

 Thank you in advance for any guidance,
Hillary.

[Michael Fry1]

Section 2 & 3 might help explain: Managing CI Changes - ServiceNow Wiki

[AndreeaI]

Hello, the link is still available? Thank you!

[Teena Singh]

Hillary,

Glad to see that you are using the Community to learn more.

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[Mwatkins]

To build on Michael's answer, here's a way of thinking about what the two lists represent:

Impacted Services (only CI's of class Business Service)

A many-to-many relationship between the Task [task] and Business Service [cmdb_ci_service] tables. The many-to-many relationships are stored in the task_cmdb_ci_service table. The logic for auto-populating the list traverses the cmdb_rel_ci table for any child records. So if you have an Exchange Email service with an SMTP child service then both would be considered impacted services and added to the list. The list can also be manually edited.

Affected CIs (can contain CI's from any class)

A many-to-many relationship between the Task [task] and Configuration Item [cmdb_ci] tables. The many-to-many relationships are stored in the task_ci table. The Affected CIs list can be manually edited through the "Edit" button or it can be edited through "Add affected CI" in the BSM Map. The list can also be populated through Add affected CIs to change requests using dependency views.