Business Service Reporting
Introduction
The concept of a business service is at the heart of IT Service Management. It calls for IT to plan, deliver, operate and control the services offered to IT business customers. Rather than thinking in terms of managing computer and applications, IT should be thinking in terms of the services it provides to the business.
The ServiceNow CMDB defines hierarchical relationships of configuration items such as servers and application that are organized into business services that business customers of IT would recognize.
This hierarchy has the potential of relating items such as computers to the business services that they enable. Moreover, we would like to use this hierarchy to relate incidents, changes, and outages to business services.
Although the CMDB has the information, reporting on hierarchies is practically impossible with most reporting tools, especially when the hierarchy is not bound to one or two levels.
To enable Business Service Reporting, Explore Analytics has two specialized sets of capabilities: Business Service Field and Business Service Filter. Together, these sets of capabilities will allow items to be rolled-up to their business services, to select business services, and report on them.
Business Service Field
Business Service Field – given a configuration items or reference to a configuration item (such as in a change request), a Business Service Field locates the upstream business service(s) for this configuration item and displays any field of that business service. When searching upstream, we could look for specific types of items, not only business services, but perhaps service offerings, application environments and more.
Business Service Filter
Business Service Filter – any view on a table with a configuration item can be filtered for items that belong to selected business services. You can say thing like "configuration item belong to service Trading" or "configuration item is downstream from application WebMail", or even "configuration item belongs to any critical business service".
