Application services for Event Management operators

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Application services for Event Management operators

    As an Event Management operator using ServiceNow, understanding application services is essential. An application service is a collection of components—called configuration items (CIs)—such as network devices, servers, and applications that collectively deliver a service to your organization. Examples include email systems or order-tracking websites. These services are predefined in your ServiceNow instance by your administrator and visually represented through service maps in the Service Operations Workspace dashboard.

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    Key Features

    • Service Maps: Visual diagrams that show the interconnected CIs forming an application service, helping you understand dependencies and structure.
    • Types of Application Services:
      • Technical Services: Dynamic groups of CIs sharing common characteristics, such as all web servers in a specific region.
      • Application Services: Can be discovered automatically via Service Mapping or manually configured by administrators.
      • Alert Groups: Alerts can be grouped to simplify monitoring and response.
    • Alert Impact and Severity: Issues on individual CIs can affect the entire application service. Impact rules configured by administrators help determine alert severity based on these relationships.
    • Impact Tree Visualization: Displays how alerts on CIs propagate to parent services, enabling operators to assess overall service health and prioritize remediation.

    Key Outcomes

    With this knowledge, Event Management operators can effectively analyze alerts, understand how individual component issues affect broader services, and take informed actions to resolve problems. Viewing service maps and impact trees in the Service Operations Workspace empowers operators to maintain service continuity and reduce downtime by addressing root causes quickly and comprehensively.

    As an Event Management operator, you need to understand what application services are.

    This is the second lesson in the Event Management tutorial.

    Lesson 1

    Overview events icon

    An overview of events and alerts
    Lesson 2 Overview BS icon

    An overview of application services
    Lesson 3 Operator icon

    Event Management operator workspaces
    Lesson 4 What operators do icon

    What operators do

    An application service is a collection of components, such as network devices, computers, and applications that offer a service to your organization. The services can be something like an email system or a website that tracks orders or requests in a database. Your administrator should have already specified the application services in your ServiceNow instance.

    Each component that makes up an application service is referred to as a configuration item or CI. This service map provides a visual representation of an application service:
    Figure 1. Service map
    Service map
    In this example, you can see a Web Portal application service with these CIs:
    • PS Apache03: An Apache web server that hosts a company website.
    • PS LinuxApp01 and PS LinuxApp02: Two Linux servers that share the workload from the web server.
    • PS ORA01: A database server that both Linux servers need to access.
    • Storage Area Network 001: A mass storage device on which the other CIs depend.

    You can see service maps like this on the Service Operations Workspace dashboard. Later in this tutorial, you will learn about the dashboard and what an application service looks like when an alert is associated with a CI.

    Types of application services

    Event Management classifies application services into the following types:
    Technical services
    A technical service is a dynamic grouping of CIs based on some common criteria. For example, a technical service could be comprised of all web servers or all Oracle databases for a specific location, like North America.
    Application services
    An application service can consist of discovered services, manual services, or both. A discovered service is an application service that the Service Mapping application finds (if your organization uses Service Mapping). A manual service is an application service that your administrator configures by selecting and adding each CI and specifying the relationships between CIs.
    Alert groups
    Alerts that are grouped together, either manually or automatically.

    Alert impact

    Application services are critical to the operations of your organization. If an issue occurs on one CI, the entire application service can be affected. Part of your role as an operator is to analyze alerts on CIs and see how they impact the application service as a whole, and then take an action to help remediate or solve the underlying issue. Your administrator can configure impact rules that go into calculations for the severity of an alert.

    Later, when you learn how to use the Service Operations Workspace dashboard, you will learn how to view an impact tree for an application service so you can understand the relationship between the severity of an alert and the overall application service.

    In this example, you can see how a Major alert on an Oracle database (PS ORA01) also causes a major alert on its parent CIs and on the Web portal application service itself.
    Figure 2. Impact tree
    Impact tree

    Continue the tutorial

    Proceed to the next lesson: Event Management operator environment.