Reporting on up/down time of a Buisiness Service

[Ed Laar1]

Reporting up/downtime of a Buisiness Service.

We created in our CMDB some Buisiness Service's and the CI's that are used by those Buisiness Services. In a lot of cases, a Buisiness Service only uses one CI but in some cases (for example a database) is used by 2 buisiness services.

The result of this simple example is that, when the database goes down, 2 Buisiness Services are affected. In our agreement with the customer we agreed an up_time for the two Buisiness Services. How can I report on the up_time of both Buisiness Services taking into consideration the down_time of the database?

Note: Of corse I use a very simple example here but you can immagine that in our CMDB the situation is much more complex. We are registering complete CI-chains including redundant situations (2 databases with the same content that supports one Business Service so when one of the two databases goes down the Buisiness Service is NOT affected) and so on.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

[PeterWiles]

Hi Ed,

I would look into Service commitments and outage reporting. http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Service_Offerings

Hopefully that is what you are looking for.

[Ed Laar1]

I am investigating in the way how to implement availability monitoring and reporting on buisines services. I found out that outages can be created on business services and when a Service Offering with Service Commitment of the type 'Availability' is configured related to that Business Service AND an outage is creted on this Service Offering the monitoring is there.
But I need the way to configure this with the following functionality and I hope someone has 'best practice experience' with this:
As soon as an Incident or a Problem is raised on a CI, an outage record has to be created on the Service Offering related to the Business Service on that CI.
Does anyone has already this mechnism in place? How did you do that? What is the 'best pratice' way to determine if an Incident results in an outage or not?

Hope for any answers/reactions.

Best regards,

Ed Laar

[kmeganphares]

We've just set up similar functionality.

What we did was we have the Outage task related to the Incidents; the primary CI automatically receives an Outage task on which Start/End times can be modified by the team to reflect the appropriate details, but the automation will default to the incident create and resolve times, if no other information is provided.   We also allow support staff to add other Outage tasks as needed (if, for example, the outage was on the website, and certain critical web parts which are reported on separately were affected by the outage).

We then configured the rest of Business Services as needed, and then wrote a script which would copy the Incident-related Outage information to the relevant Service Offerings.  

As mentioned, we have just set this up in January - Everything seems to be working as expected, and our testing has revealed no issues, even though we had to make that leap ourselves.

(This shouldn't impact the outcome, but I wanted to explain why we related Outages to Incidents several years ago....We are not yet reporting on true Services - in our case, we've set up Business Services the way that you have, however we're calling our "service" the same name as the Application as placeholders for true Services.)

I hope you can use that info!

[shane_davis]

Ed - Have you found an answer for the item you submitted below yet? I would like to know the "best practice" and also if an Outage could be automatically started when a Pri 1 or 2 INC is opened and then stopped when the INC is resolved.


"As soon as an Incident or a Problem is raised on a CI, an outage record has to be created on the Service Offering related to the Business Service on that CI.
Does anyone has already this mechnism in place? How did you do that? What is the 'best pratice' way to determine if an Incident results in an outage or not?"