Service mapping

The organization provides services to its customers. IT plays a critical role in providing services to the business community who actually deliver the services to the end users or sell the products. Each line of a separate product line or type of service provided is called a business service. Some examples of business services include:

• Financial institutions such as a bank might have business services such as loans, credit cards, banking accounts, and so on
• In a health care pharmacy business, services might include research, development, and manufacturing
• In an oil and gas business, services might be downstream, upstream, manufacturing, research and development, and shipping

Each organization has exclusive types of business services to offer, some of the business services might overlap, which are pertinent to the same type of domain. A business service view to IT is most important to understand how IT is impacting the business or supporting a business service. Service mapping helps to bridge the gap to understand how IT is connected to the business. Service mapping helps to build a detailed map of all the configuration items, including all the hardware and software related configuration items used in a business service.

In some of the organizations people usually take an inventory of the list of configuration items that are isolated inpidually. These do not have any view of how configuration items are connected to a given business service, these types of mapping are called horizontal mapping, which just has relation to how CI's are connected to inpidual configuration item components, but no relation to each component of the configuration item. In a service mapping there is a holistic view of how different CI's components are mapped to other inpidual components of a business service.

Service mapping collects data about devices and applications used in business services in the organization. It then creates a map of business services and writes the collected data into the CMDB. Service mapping uses patterns to discover and map CIs. A typical service mapping pattern consists of two types of algorithms--one for CI identification and one for finding CI connections.

Business service maps show the snapshot of the interconnection between the infrastructure and the business service, service mapping helps to regenerate the maps with up-to-date information.

Service mapping creates maps of the business services by working together with other ServiceNow components. Service mapping uses the ECC queue and MID Servers for discovery and it writes discovered information into CMDB.

Mapping of devices is dependent on how the MID Server is set up and how discovery is configured. There might be a need of multiple MID Servers based on several factors, including configuration items sitting on a dematerialized zone and also secured network, multiple MID Servers are placed to discover data from multiple sources, and doing the service mapping.

The following figure describes how MID Server is set up in a domain separation environment: