What is the correct table to store relationships between Services, other Services and other non-Service CI's ?

[keviningleby]

Hi folks,

I quickly mocked up a CI-relationship/depedency map between different Services (with different Service Classifications) and other CI's such as Applications - using the "cmdb_rel_ci" table   and "Depends on:Used by", etc. (I also used the "Parent" facility between "Shared Service", "Technical Service" and "Business Service" and configured a "tree-picker" form to take advantage.

All worked fine.

Then I noticed this manual page -

Business service tables

- which suggests that I should have used the "svc_ci_assoc" table for this purpose.

Can anyone enlighten me as to why this should be so - and also perhaps explain the purpose of the "svc_rel_assoc" table (should I be populating this too) ?

Many thanks

Kevin

[jake_mckenna]

That table is populated by Service Mapping plugin and also can be populated when using manual services that come with the Event Management plugin by adding the related list to the table and using the Populate UI action. This table is intended to collect all the related CI records that have a relationship to a Business service to a certain tree level. I would say that you should not be populating it "manually" unless you mean to use the ui action connected to the table.

It is used to build out the maps you will see for Manual and Automated Business Services if you are using the Service Mapping and Event Management plugin. Future use might be to point to that table for affected CIs when linking changes to a business service or vice versa.

Hope this helps, but let me know if you have further questions.

[Uncle Rob]

So prior to Service Mapping and Event Management plugins, using the cmdb_rel_ci table was the correct course of action, right?

Is the assumption that once one adopts Service Mapping, the relationships are now more accurately tracked via SM's discovering capability?   How would you recommend a client reconciles that with the previous mapping work they've done?

(Also, thanks for swinging by and providing your guidance)

[jake_mckenna]

I think to try and answer both questions here is to say that using cmdb_rel_ci today is good for initial, but once you   start using the ITOM suite or Service Mapping you can start to leverage tables such svc_ci_assoc where this details is being tracked and provided for all your business services. It becomes less a manual feature and more automated to keep a clean list of everything related to a Business Service. Your manual services can be added to the same list by using the features added to push their relationships that have been created manually to the same table so you should not lose data or effort once that day comes.

Update manual service relationships

[Uncle Rob]

Thanks for the response Jake.   It'd be great for some of SN's experienced resources in this area to start some blogs on the topic.   Out in the market there's a lot of uncertainty here.