Exploring Service Mapping
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Service Mapping
Service Mapping in ServiceNow discovers and maps all service instances within an organization, creating a detailed view of the interconnected devices, applications, and configuration profiles that deliver business services. It enables IT teams to move beyond traditional horizontal discovery—which inventories individual assets—by providing top-down mapping that reveals the dependencies and relationships between components of a service. This comprehensive perspective helps organizations understand how issues in one component affect the overall service.
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Key Features
- Service Instance Mapping: Maps interconnected applications and hosts configured to deliver specific services, whether internal (e.g., email systems) or customer-facing (e.g., websites).
- Top-Down Mapping: Focuses on relationships and dependencies rather than isolated assets, supporting better impact analysis and service management.
- Mapping Methods: Supports multiple discovery methods including pattern-based detection, tag-based mapping using asset tags, traffic-based mapping following network connections, and predictive intelligence–based discovery. This flexibility allows tailoring discovery to organizational needs.
- Integration with ServiceNow AI Platform: Relies on Discovery and MID Server to collect data, and integrates with Event Management, Dependency Views, and Application Portfolio Management (APM) for enhanced visibility and operational insights.
- Domain Separation Support: Enables secure, domain-specific access and management of service maps in multi-tenant environments.
- Tag-Based Mapping Workspace: Provides an intuitive dashboard for managing tag-based service mappings, featuring widgets and visualizations to create and update services efficiently.
- Traversal Rules: Define how configuration items are related and connected, ensuring accurate and comprehensive service maps.
Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers
- Service Mapping requires the Discovery product to be activated and properly configured, including user roles and credentials for accessing network devices and applications.
- Regular regeneration of service maps ensures up-to-date visibility into service health, with faulty elements clearly highlighted along with their impact on related components.
- Cloud environments benefit significantly from Service Mapping by gaining visibility into dependencies across IaaS and PaaS platforms, improving service management and operational control.
- Integration with Event Management enables proactive monitoring and faster remediation of service-impacting events based on the detailed dependency data.
Benefits
By implementing Service Mapping, your IT department can gain a service-aware infrastructure view, understand service dependencies clearly, and respond more effectively to issues impacting business services. This leads to improved operational efficiency, enhanced service quality, and better alignment between IT infrastructure and business needs.
Service Mapping discovers all service instances in your organization and builds a comprehensive map of all devices, applications, and configuration profiles used in these service instances.
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 that are configured to offer a service to the organization. Service instances 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 service instances. 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.