Working with SRM services

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Working with SRM services

    In Service Reliability Management (SRM), aservicerepresents a functional outcome—such as networking, payments, or HR—that is owned and managed by a team. Services may include multiple technical components or shared infrastructure elements. SRM integrates with monitoring tools to prioritize and route alerts to the appropriate responders, ensuring timely incident acknowledgment and escalation.

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    When creating or adding a service in SRM, it must correspond to an existing service in your infrastructure. You can link multiple tool integrations to monitor technical components of a service and create reliability metrics to track performance. Associating a team and policies with a service streamlines responsibility assignment, automates response routines, and optimizes notification workflows.

    Key Features

    • Service Overview Tab: Displays key metrics across several cards such as "Your services," "Services with active incidents," "Services with critical alerts," "Services with open changes," and "Services with low error budget."
    • Metrics and Sorting: Services are sorted by business criticality, number of incidents or alerts, and error budget remaining, helping prioritize attention effectively.
    • Error Budget Tracking: Shows the percentage of service level objective (SLO) budget remaining, helping manage release velocity and maintain reliability targets.
    • List View Customization: Allows grouping, filtering, editing, sorting, and exporting service data for tailored reporting and analysis.
    • Service Reliability Dashboard: A customizable dashboard that provides high-level views of service performance and reliability metrics.
    • Service Management: Enables adding new services to SRM and editing details of existing services, including assigning ownership and support team information.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    By using SRM services, your teams can efficiently monitor and manage the health and reliability of business-critical services. The integration with alerting tools and the ability to define error budgets facilitate proactive incident management and informed decision-making on release schedules. Customizable views and dashboards provide actionable insights to improve service reliability and team collaboration.

    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.

    Service Reliability Management (SRM) works with integrations to prioritize and route alerts to the relevant responders. It follows up with escalations until the alert is acknowledged and someone responds. 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. See Working with SRM integrations for more information.

    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 Overview

    Figure 1. Information on the Overview tab
    Services page showing the list of your services

    The cards on the Overview tab display the following metrics. By default, the list view shows information related to the Your services card. Select a different card to view different information in the list view.

    • Your services: Count of all the services you or your team manages and monitors for reliability.
    • Services with active incidents: Services with open incidents sorted in the following order:
      • Business criticality - most critical first.
      • Number of active incidents - highest first.
      • Percentage of error budget remaining - lowest first.
    • Services with critical alerts: Services with open alerts sorted in the following order:
      • Business criticality - most critical first.
      • Number of alerts - highest first.
      • Percentage of error budget remaining - lowest first.
    • Services with open changes: All the services your team manages and monitors.
    • Services with low error budget: Services with less than 25% error budget remaining.

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

    Note:
    To refresh the card and list values, select Refresh Refresh icon.
    You can interact with the list in the following ways:

    For more information about individual service details, see Edit service details form.

    Services list view definitions

    The columns include the following details:
    • Service: Name of the service.
    • Class: Application or technical service.
    • Business criticality: Importance of the service to the business.
    • 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.

    Service reliability

    The Service reliability tab is a customizable dashboard showing high-level service performance. For more information about the dashboard, see Visualizations in the Service reliability dashboard.