Exploring Service Mapping
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Service Mapping
Service Mapping in ServiceNow Australia release enables IT departments and cloud service providers to discover and map all service instances within their organization. It creates comprehensive, up-to-date maps of interconnected devices, applications, and configuration profiles that collectively deliver business services. This top-down approach focuses on understanding dependencies between components, unlike traditional horizontal discovery that treats devices and applications as isolated objects.
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Key Features
- Service Instance Mapping: Identifies sets of interconnected hosts and applications configured to provide specific internal or customer-facing services, such as email systems or web applications.
- Top-Down Mapping: Visualizes dependencies between infrastructure elements to quickly assess the impact of issues within a service instance.
- Mapping Methods: Supports multiple discovery techniques including pattern-based (using operational sequences to detect attributes and connections), tag-based (leveraging asset tags), traffic-based (following network traffic flows), and predictive intelligence-based discovery.
- Regular Map Updates: Continuously regenerates service maps to reflect current infrastructure states, highlighting faults and their effects on service health.
- Integration with ServiceNow AI Platform: Uses Discovery and MID Server for data collection and communication. Maps and related data are accessible in Event Management, Dependency Views, and Application Portfolio Management (APM).
- Domain Separation Support: Ensures users and administrators only access service maps relevant to their designated domains.
- Traversal Rules: Define how relationships between configuration items are identified and mapped to build accurate service maps.
Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers
- Service Mapping requires the Discovery product to be activated and configured, including user roles and credentials for internal network access.
- Understanding which mapping method best fits your organization’s environment and asset management practices is crucial for effective service mapping.
- Integration with Event Management and APM enables proactive service monitoring and performance management based on comprehensive dependency data.
- In cloud environments, Service Mapping enhances visibility of application dependencies across IaaS and PaaS, improving service management.
Benefits
- Provides a service-aware view of infrastructure, enabling IT teams to understand and manage service dependencies effectively.
- Facilitates rapid impact analysis of faults by visually connecting problematic components to affected services.
- Supports continuous service performance monitoring and risk mitigation through integration with other ServiceNow ITOM modules.
- Enables better governance and access control with domain separation capabilities.
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.