Thanks for engaging.

 

For Context we are adhering to CSDM relationships (The Business Service Offering has a dependent relationship to the Application Service which may have a dependent relationship to a Technical Service and its Infra components.

 

Replaying your Questions:

1. How would an organization translate the status of the CI into the status of the Service? 
   1. The CI according to Best Practice would be The Application Service itself or an infra component or Tech Service that the Application Service is dependent on.  Based on the fact that we rarely have an Entire App Service down, we are at a degraded state, but at the component level we may either have an unplanned outage or degraded outage.  The Business Service Offering that is dependent on the App Service could be either fully unavailable or degraded.  The problem we have is exactly where your question is at...how does the business perceive the service that they are offered?  Often they are seeing a sporadic level of service....but what is the line in the sand of when that degradation is beyond acceptable and should be considered a full unplanned outage effecting availability?
2. Is this a function of the relationship in the CMDB between the components and the service (which assumes the type of relationship is absolute)?  
   1. Most of the times we have a 1:1 relationship from the Business Service Offering to the Application Service.  However there is a 1 to many relationship from the App Service to the Service Offering.
3. Or is it instead that the organization would create separate outage records for each status of each component, i.e. two outage records for the CI, one for Service 1, two for Service 2, 1 for Service 3, and none for Service 4?
   1. At this time we would have separate outages (we are not putting outages on the App Service yet, but will be down the road)  So often times we go back to the scenerio where the App Service is displaying degradation where offerings that depend on him are a mixed bag of Degradation and Unplanned Outage.

 

In the end, i'm still left with a location to define what is an acceptable level of Service to determine if the offering should qualify for a degradation or an unplanned outage.  Or are we trying to split hairs unnecessarily?  However it is important to measure both and the data quality  of the differences are important.  At what point is the offering deemed as not meeting the expected level of service to qualify for Degradation vs Unplanned Outage?  Currently we are looking to be more detailed in the "Service Level Requirement" free text field to note a general statement of acceptable performance between degradation and unplanned outage.

 

I was curious if others are experiencing something similar and what they have done as well as recognizing the importance of measuring both Availability and Degradation Minutes.  Which leads us further down the road of finding a way to set a threshold of acceptable degradation before breach of threshold.

 

#csdm #spm #digital portfolio management #dpm #cmdb #outage