Understand Service Maps

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Understand Service Maps

    Service maps provide a visual representation of active alerts for Configuration Items (CIs) and their interrelationships within your IT environment. They help you quickly identify the source of alerts and understand CI dependencies, enabling more effective troubleshooting and remediation. Service maps are available for all application services and monitored services, offering enhanced visibility into alert impacts and service health.

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    Key Features

    • Alert Visualization: Service maps display alerts associated with CIs, color-coded by severity levels ranging from critical (red) to OK (green) and no color for no active alerts.
    • CI Relationships: The maps illustrate relationships between various CIs such as applications (e.g., Microsoft IIS, SQL servers), physical and virtual machines, network devices, storage devices, and related web services.
    • Dynamic Updates: Service maps update automatically as service map definitions or alert impact information changes, ensuring real-time accuracy.
    • Entry Point Problem Identification: From the Quebec release onward, service maps enhance visibility by identifying problems bound to entry points, although alerts on entry points themselves are not displayed.
    • Iconography: Different icons represent types of CIs and their states, including redundant CIs, workload connections, and network starting points, aiding in quick comprehension of complex environments.
    • Session Persistence: Unlike other screens, session timeout settings do not apply on the service map screen; the session remains active without interaction until manual logout or tab closure.

    How to Access

    • From the Application Services list, you can open service maps for application services.
    • From the Monitored Services list, you can view service maps for monitored services.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    Service maps enable customers to:

    • Visualize the impact of alerts across interdependent CIs to prioritize remediation efforts.
    • Understand complex service relationships and dependencies to better manage service health.
    • Quickly identify and address critical issues affecting service availability and performance.
    • Leverage real-time updates to maintain an accurate operational picture without manual intervention.

    Service maps show active alerts for CIs and the relationships between CIs. By viewing this information, you can better understand the source of alerts and take remediation steps. The service map is available for all application services.

    About Service Maps

    A service map shows alerts with impacted CIs and CI interdependencies. For example, changes to a connection between a host and hypervisor appear on the service map. As service map definitions change, the service map, alert, and impact information updates accordingly. From the Quebec release, there is enhanced visibility. When the alert is bound to the entry point, the service map identifies an entry point problem.
    Note:
    Alerts will not be displayed for the entry points on the service map.

    You can open a service map from these places:

    • From the Application services list, you can view service maps for application services.
    • From the Monitored services list, you can view service maps for monitored services.

    The following icons are used in service maps. The icon shapes are slightly different for application services.

    Table 1. Service map icons
    Icon Description
    (Application server icon.) Represents applications such as Microsoft IIS or SQL servers.
    (Call server icon.) Represents physical and VM computers and servers.
    (Entry point icon.) Represents the network starting point. For example, Layer 3 devices appear toward the top of the map, and connected software and services appear near the end of the map.
    (Redundancy box icon.) Shows the number of redundant CIs.
    (Load balancer icon.) Shows the workload between machines.

    (Gray connector icon.)

    		 The gray connector shows a relationship between CIs.
    (CI with no active alerts box icon.) Each CI with no active alerts box represents a network CI. A gray box represents a CI with no active alerts. Information about the CI is hidden.
    (Redundancy box icon.) Hides multiple CIs that are designated as redundant.

    (Box with orange severity color icon.)

    		 An impacted CI displays the color that represents the severity of the alert associated with the CI.
    • Critical (red): Immediate action is required. The resource is either not functional or critical problems are imminent.
    • Major (orange): Major functionality is severely impaired or performance has degraded.
    • Minor (yellow): Partial, non-critical loss of functionality or performance degradation occurred.
    • Warning (blue): Attention is required, even though the resource is still functional.
    • OK (green): An alert is created. The resource is still functional.
    • No color: No active alerts.
    (Storage icon.) Represents a fiber channel, hard drives, or other data storage devices.
    (Web server icon.) Represents related web services for the network such as NGINX or JBoss web server.
    Note:
    Session timeout settings don't apply to this screen. The session remains connected, even when there is no human interaction. If this setting is a concern, either log out or close the active tab in the browser.