Application services for Event Management operators

Release version: Yokohama

Updated January 30, 2025

2 minutes to read

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Summary of Application services for Event Management operators

Application services are essential collections of components such as network devices, computers, and applications that deliver vital services to your organization, like email systems or order tracking websites. These components, known as configuration items (CIs), are visually represented through service maps within ServiceNow. As an Event Management operator, understanding these services and their components is crucial to effectively managing and responding to alerts.

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Key Features

Service Maps: Visual representations that show the relationships between CIs within an application service, aiding in quick comprehension of infrastructure dependencies.
Types of Application Services:
- Technical Services: Dynamic groupings of CIs sharing common criteria, such as all web servers in a region.
- Application Services: Can be discovered automatically via Service Mapping or manually configured by administrators defining CIs and their relationships.
- Alert Groups: Collections of alerts grouped for easier management, either manually or automatically.
Alert Impact and Severity: Alerts on individual CIs can affect the entire application service. Operators analyze these alerts to understand their impact and severity, guided by configured impact rules.
Service Operations Workspace Dashboard: Provides views such as impact trees to see how alerts on CIs affect the parent application service, helping prioritize and remediate issues effectively.

Key Outcomes

By understanding application services and their components, Event Management operators can:

Quickly identify which parts of an application service are affected by alerts.
Assess the overall impact of CI-level issues on critical organizational services.
Use visual tools like service maps and impact trees to make informed decisions.
Collaborate effectively with administrators who configure these services and impact rules.
Navigate the Service Operations Workspace dashboard to monitor and manage alerts efficiently.

This knowledge enables operators to respond proactively to incidents, minimizing service disruptions and maintaining organizational operations.

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		An overview of events and alerts
Lesson 2		An overview of application services
Lesson 3		Event Management operator workspaces
Lesson 4		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:

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.

Continue the tutorial

Proceed to the next lesson: Event Management operator environment.