How Does a Change Request detect a Business Service Blackout Schedule

[Griff2]

Hey,

Our Change Management Team would like a way to create a blackout that is for a business service offering. They would like the conflict detection to run on the Impacted Services/CIs section of the change record.

For example we might not want anything done that might cause something to go wrong with a Business Service Offering called "Important Stuff".  It's really important for the next week because the CEO does Important Stuff and he or she has to show demonstrate Important Stuff to shareholders.

Then let's say that a tech enterprise team is patching windows servers, where they would load their servers into the affected CIs tab.  If "Important Stuff" shows up in the Impacted Services tab, because ServiceNow has identified a mapping dependency between the Server, an App Service, and the Service Offering, then the blackout schedule "Don't put Important Stuff at Risk" should show up in the conflicts.

Is this where the Business Service Blackout Schedule can be used?  And if so, how exactly would I load the blackout to make sure the conflict detection will line up?  If not, any suggestions on how this could work?

If it had to be done at the Application Service level that would work too, but it would just require more manual work as Change would have to list each app service individually, whereas using one layer higher with the Business Service Offering would utilise the existing mapping.

[Dan O Connor · Accepted solution]

Yeah so this is in essence what our Conflict Detection functionality is for. It can be setup in a number of ways. 

Below is an example of how you might setup the Blackout Schedule. Or you could set it up using Source = CI and then in condition identify where its part of service/service offerings Important Stuff. There is multiple ways to do this, but ultimately it's about creating a Blackout that will capture all your relevant entities.

This will somewhat depend on how accurate and well maintained your CMDB and Service catalogs are. Personally, I might not look into creating a new Service group containing the important stuff, but use the 'Business Criticality' field on Services and Service Offerings. If set to 1, maybe those are the ones to include in your blackout window.

Below is an example of what I mentioned above

Change has properties around conflict detection that you can configure to denote how you want conflict detection to work. So as you mentioned, maybe someone wants to perform a change on a router, but that router forms part of an important Service Offering. Conflict detection can alert that to the user.

Here is an example of one of those settings

You can see them in Change Management -> Conflict Properties

Here is some information on what the properties do - Conflict Properties

[Griff2]

Hey,

I've just had some time to go into our Sandpit environment and experiment.  After enabling conflict detection against related Application Services I have it working, at least in a way we can functionally use.  Thanks.

It's a pity it will only go as far as Impacted Application Services.  It would be nice if you could also have it pick up Service Offerings that show in the Impact Services tab, but it does specifically say App Services in the conflict administration.

It means that instead of being able to load a blackout schedule for the service offering "Important Stuff", I need to load a blackout schedule and list all the application services mapped to Important Stuff.