Exploring Service Mapping
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Service Mapping
Service Mapping in ServiceNow discovers and maps all application services within your organization by identifying the interconnected devices, applications, and configuration profiles that constitute these services. It provides IT departments with a service-aware infrastructure view, enabling better understanding and management of application dependencies and service health across both internal and customer-facing services.
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Key Features
- Top-down mapping: Unlike traditional horizontal discovery that inventories devices and applications independently, Service Mapping creates dependency maps that show how components interconnect and impact each other, enabling immediate visualization of service health and fault impact.
- Multiple discovery methods: Supports pattern-based discovery using sequences of operations to detect device and application attributes, tag-based mapping leveraging asset tags, traffic-based mapping by following communication flows, and predictive intelligence-based discovery for cloud and complex environments.
- Integration with ServiceNow AI Platform: Works with Discovery and MID Server to collect data, which is then utilized in Event Management (for event monitoring and recovery), Dependency Views (to visualize relationships), and Application Portfolio Management (APM) for business application monitoring.
- Support for domain separation: Allows administrators and users to access and manage application services only within their assigned domains, ensuring security and data segregation.
- Tag-based mapping dashboard: Provides an intuitive interface within the Service Mapping Workspace to manage, update, and create tag-based services efficiently with visual widgets and navigation tools.
- Traversal rules: Automate the identification and mapping of relationships between configuration items, ensuring comprehensive and accurate service maps.
Key Outcomes
- Gain a comprehensive and up-to-date view of application services and their underlying infrastructure, improving IT operational awareness.
- Quickly identify faulty components and understand their impact on overall service health, facilitating faster incident response and resolution.
- Improve service management by visualizing dependencies and connections across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, including IaaS and PaaS.
- Enhance collaboration between teams by providing clear service context through integrated views in Event Management, Dependency Views, and APM.
- Streamline service mapping configuration and updates with flexible discovery methods and user-friendly tools like the tag-based mapping dashboard.
Prerequisites and Important Considerations
Service Mapping requires the Discovery product to be activated and configured, including user definition and credential setup to access internal devices and applications. It relies on the MID Server for communication with endpoints. Proper configuration ensures accurate and secure discovery and mapping of service components.
Service Mapping discovers all application services in your organization and builds a comprehensive map of all devices, applications, and configuration profiles used in these application services.
This video provides an overview of Service Mapping on the ServiceNow AI Platform.
Who uses Service Mapping
Service Mapping enables IT departments of companies, organizations, and cloud companies providing platform as a service to create a service-aware view of infrastructure.
How do you use Service Mapping
A service instance is a set of interconnected applications and hosts which are configured to offer a service to the organization. Application services can be internal, like an organization email system or customer-facing, like an organization website. For example, creating financial reports through a web-based application requires a computer, web server, application server, databases, middleware, and network infrastructure. These applications and hosts are all configured to offer the service of financial reporting.
Typically, IT departments create and maintain an inventory that treats devices and applications as standalone, independent objects. Connections between the devices and applications are not included. This is usually referred to as horizontal discovery. This method does not address the biggest challenge for IT departments, which is understanding the connection and dependencies between each object.
Service Mapping maps dependencies, based on a connection between devices and applications. This method is referred to as top-down mapping. The top-down mapping helps you immediately see the impact of a problematic object on the rest of the service instance operation.
Service instance maps show infrastructure objects and semantic connections between them. Service Mapping regenerates service instance maps regularly, to keep them updated and relevant. Any faulty objects are shown along with the devices and applications they affect, providing a visual clue of the state of the service instance.
How does Service Mapping work
Service Mapping can deploy different methods for creating application services. The main method of Service Mapping discovering and mapping devices and applications is using patterns. A pattern is a sequence of operations whose purpose is to detect attributes of devices and applications and their outbound connections. If your organization uses tags for asset management, you can use these tags to map application services. Service Mapping can also discover devices and applications by following traffic connections between them. This method is referred to as traffic-based mapping. For more information, see Choose the right method for discovery and mapping application services.
What to know before you begin
You can use Service Mapping only if the Discovery product is activated and set up.
You must define users and configure credentials to allow Service Mapping and Discovery access to applications and devices inside your organization network. For more information, see Configuring Service Mapping.
Service Mapping on the ServiceNow AI Platform
Service Mapping relies on Discovery and the MID Server to discover devices and applications. Service Mapping uses results of horizontal discovery performed by Discovery. The MID Server facilitates communication between Service Mapping and devices and applications it discovers.
Data collected and organized by Service Mapping is visible in Event Management, Dependency Views, and Application Portfolio Management (APM). With Event Management, you can view events to take actions for recovering your organization application services. Dependency Views shows relationships between devices and applications in the context of application services they belong to. When integrated with APM, Service Mapping provides information about components making up a business application and helps APM users to monitor business application performance.
Service Mapping supports domain separation. If your ServiceNow AI Platform uses domain separation, administrators and users can only see and manage application services belonging to their own domain.
To view a list of Service Mapping plugin dependencies, see Plugins or applications installed with ITOM Visibility.