Earlier this month, we at Explore Analytics unveiled ground-breaking new Business Service Reporting, designed to make true mature service-oriented analytics possible for the first time.

One of the barriers of achieving true Business Service Reporting in the past is complex CMDB hierarchies that need to be understood in order to deliver mature Business Service-focused analytics.

When we spoke to our customers, we understood quickly that aligning incidents, problems, changes, and availability to the business service would be only a starting point for many customers. IT Environments are frequently mapping their CMDB up to multiple levels of Services and Applications.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through an example to show how we can easily produce live reports against a multi-tiered service hierarchy in a way that is intuitive and easy-to-use.

For the purposes of this example, we are going to begin with a two-tier service hierarchy.

We will assume that configuration items roll up into Applications (on the ServiceNow table Application [cmdb_ci_appl]), and Applications roll up into Business Services (on the ServiceNow table Business Service [cmdb_ci_service]).

We would like a report that looks at the number of recent outages that have impacted business services and applications.

To create this report:

1. Navigate to File > New View.
2. Select your ServiceNow data source and the table Outage
3. Name the view and select Chart.
4. Click Filter Data and provide the following filters:
   1. Created during this quarter
   2. Configuration item belongs to any business service
5. For the Category, select Configuration Item, and then click the Pencil icon to change the Field Settings.
6. Relabel the field Business Service and click the Business Service button.
7. Click Ok.
8. For the Secondary Category, select Configuration Item, and then click the Pencil icon to change the Field Settings.
9. Relabel the field Application and click the Business Service button.
10. Select the checkbox for My business service is not a business service…, and then select Application from the CI Type dropdown below. Click Ok.

Your report will look like this:

Now, it is easy to see how business services overall are performing with a live report, and also understand how individual applications are performing. Click the names in the Legend to “Keep only” or “Hide” particular applications.

The steps above work whether your service tiers are defined using separate tables (e.g. Business Service and Application) or using fields within a table (e.g. a field on Business Service called Level to define level in the hierarchy).

With no other solution are you able to simply drag and drop different business service levels into your reporting solution and get live, interactive reports at multiple Business Service layers. For more technical details, refer to our wiki documentation.