What is the difference between BS/CI relationships and associations?

[stefanlowrie]

Creating relationships is pretty straight forward.   I can make a business service like "Email Service" depend on a CI like "Exchange Server" using the relationship editor.   These relationships are stored in the cmdb_rel_ci table.   But I see a separate table out there called svc_ci_assoc that creates "associations" between a business service and a CI.   Can anyone explain what the purpose of that table is and when you would use associations instead of relationships?   What forms or functions in the system use this association data?

[bernyalvarado]

Hi Stefan,

The association data found in the svc_ tables is used by ServiceMapping. As ServiceMapping performs the top-down discovery, it does not store the relationship between the CIs and the business Services in the cmdb_rel_ci table but it will instead store the relationship within the table svc_model_assoc_ci (among at other svc_* tables).

Thanks,

Berny

[bernyalvarado]

I hope this helps!

Thanks,

Berny