Difference between Affected CIs and Impacted Services/CIs?

[Batman3]

What is the difference between the two fields?

I'm wondering what best practice is regarding the two within ITSM processes.

[Martin Grosskop · Accepted solution]

The Affected CIs tab is where you would list all the CIs that you are going to change.

The Impacted services/CIs is populated with the Services that will be impacted based on the CIs you are going to change. This is achieved by looking at the Affected CIs and then chasing the relationships up to which Services are dependent on the CI.

I have previously changed the label on these tabs to avoid confusion:

"Affected CIs" relabelled to "CIs being Changed"

"Impacted Services/CIs" relabelled to "Impacted Services"

Regards

Martin

[Batman3]

So I'm guessing if you had the relationships built out, when you selected the affected CIs (the ones undergoing the change)

The impacted CI tab would not automatically populate based off the relationships of the selected affected CIs?

[Henrik Jutterst]

That's correct. You need the relations in order to get impacted services to trigger.

You can also trigger impacted services like this.

"Refresh list of Business Services impacted by the associated CI"

[Martin Grosskop]

The Impacted Services tab is populated via the Refresh Impacted Services UI Action.

Depending on the version you are on, there are different behaviours.

In London, the Refresh Impacted Services UI Action only works off of the "main" CI on the Change form. In out of the box instances this is the field labeled Configuration Item.

In Madrid and later, there is a property that you can set to make the Refresh Impacted Services UI Action work on all the CIs on the related list (change.refresh_impacted.include_affected_cis).

On the surface the new behaviour seems ideal, but there is a catch - it only works on Business Services that have previously been converted to an Application Service.

So if you haven't converted all your Business Services to Application Services, then it doesn't work. In fact it doesn't even bring in the services impacted by the Configuration Item field.

So I have found it necessary to write a new version of the Refresh Impacted Services UI Action that walks through the Affect CIs related list and for each CI in the list calls the CIUtils.servicesAffectedByCi method.

Not ideal:(

Regards

Martin