Working with SRM services

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Working with SRM services

    In ServiceNow Service Reliability Management (SRM), aservicerepresents a functional outcome such as networking, payments, or HR services, owned by a team. Each service can include multiple technical components or shared infrastructure elements. SRM integrates with monitoring tools to prioritize and route alerts to the appropriate responders, ensuring timely acknowledgment and escalation until resolution.

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    When you create or add a service in SRM, it must correspond to an actual service in your infrastructure. Multiple tool integrations can be added to monitor different technical services and receive events effectively. Services can also have reliability metrics configured to track performance and reliability.

    Associating a team and policies with a service simplifies responsibility division, tracking technical outcomes, automating response workflows, and managing notifications.

    Key Features

    • Service Cards on Landing Page: Display key metrics such as total services managed, services with active incidents or critical alerts, services with open changes, and those with low error budgets.
    • Error Budget Metric: Represents the allowable SLO spend over time, helping teams manage release velocity and prioritize efforts.
    • Service List View: Allows filtering, grouping, sorting, editing, and exporting of services, with columns including service name, class (Application or Technical), business criticality, open alerts, open incidents, and error budget remaining.
    • Service Details Editing: Enables teams to update service information and specify the supporting SRM team.
    • Integration Management: Services can be linked to multiple monitoring tool integrations to streamline alerting and incident management.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    ServiceNow customers can leverage SRM services to clearly represent and manage their business and technical services within SRM. This enables centralized monitoring, alert prioritization, and response automation based on team ownership and policies. Tracking error budgets and business criticality helps in maintaining service reliability and making informed decisions regarding incident and change management.

    Adding and maintaining accurate service records in SRM ensures your teams have visibility into the health and performance of critical services, enabling proactive management and faster resolution of issues.

    A service represents a functional outcome like networking, payments, or HR services, that is owned by a team. To deliver that outcome, a service can contain one or more technical components like a user authentication service, or a piece of shared infrastructure like a database.

    SRM works with integrations to prioritize and route alerts to the right responders and follow up with escalation until the alert is acknowledged and you know that someone is responding. When you create or add a service in SRM, it must reflect a service in your SRM infrastructure.
    Note:

    You might want multiple tool integrations to monitor each technical service and receive events from those tools. Add an integration to SRM using the Services Services icon module. See Working with SRM integrations.

    In addition, you can create reliability metrics for the service. See Working with Reliability metrics

    Tying a team and policies to that service makes it easier to divide responsibilities and track technical outcomes. It also makes it easier to automate response routines and focus on who you notify and when.

    The state of an exiting service is inherited. The state of a created service in SRM is None.

    Services

    Figure 1. Services landing page
    Services page showing the list of your services
    The services cards display metrics for:
    • Your Services: Count of all the services you or your team manages and monitors for reliability.
    • Services with active incidents: Services with one or more open incidents, sorted first by business criticality, most critical at the top; then sorted by number of active incidents, highest number at the top; and finally sorted by % of error budget remaining, lowest at the top.
    • Services with critical alerts: Services with open alerts, sorted first by business criticality, most critical at the top; then sorted by number of alerts, highest number at the top; and finally sorted by % of error budget remaining, lowest at the top.
    • Services with open changes: All the services your team manages and monitors.
    • Services with low error budget: Services with error budget remaining < 25%

      The error budget metric is represented as the amount of SLO that you can spend over a specified time. It can be used to manage release velocity.

    Note:
    To refresh the card values, as well as the lists they represent, use the browser Refresh Refresh icon button.
    The list view varies depending on the Services card selected.
    Note:
    Your services is the default selection for the landing page.

    Each column in the list can be grouped or filtered.

    Each list can be edited, sorted or exported.

    For more detailed information on individual service details, see Edit service details form.

    Services list view metric definitions

    Service level objectives section
    • Service: Name of the service.
    • Class: Application or Technical service.
    • Business criticality: How important this service is the business.
      Choices are:
      • 1 - most critical (default)
      • 2 - somewhat critical
      • 3 - less critical
      • 4 - not critical
    • Open alerts: Number of open alerts assigned to the service.
    • Open incidents: Number of open incidents assigned to the service.
    • Error budget remaining: Percentage of error budget remaining for the service.