Service modeling and blueprints

A service is a logical group of entities or Configuration Items (CIs) that work together to achieve a comprehensive, end-to-end business goal. HR service, admin service, and payroll service are a few examples of business services. These entities can be applications, middleware, security, storage, networks, and other subservices that provide context to business goal.

A few advantages of defining a service are:

Enables you to efficiently manage the underlying applications and infrastructure relevant to your business.
Provides an option to track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) associated with the service.

Related topics

Modeling service blueprints

Modeling business services

Publishing groups as service models Open link

Start anywhere application modeling in BMC Helix Discovery Open link

Service modeling in BMC Helix AIOps

Service models are visualizations of services and the relationships between various logical components or CIs. Service models provide business context to the information within the service.

BMC Helix AIOps gives you multiple ways to define service models according to the logical construct that you want to build:

Service blueprints: This modeling approach gives you complete control of the service composition. You can use both static and dynamic content to control the model composition.
Start anywhere application modeling: This modeling approach enables you to choose any entry point into an application or Business Service and begin modeling from there.
Groups as services: This modeling approach gives you an option to define groups in BMC Helix Operations Management.

Modeling Groups as Services in BMC Helix Operations Management

Groups defined in BMC Helix Operations Management can be published as service models. As each group is a logical collection of monitored entities in BMC Helix Operations Management, you can model a group as a business service, publish it, and view and monitor in BMC Helix AIOps and BMC Helix Discovery. For more information, see and publish them as service models. Open link

Service blueprints

Blueprints are predefined service templates or building blocks to be readily used by organizations for defining services when creating service models. Service blueprints visually map out the steps in a service process and make it easier to design a new service or improve an existing service. The service blueprint plays a significant role in managing service operations, service design, and service positioning.

Service blueprints in BMC Helix AIOps, includes CIs that can be defined to have static or dynamic rules. Each node contains one or more CI Kinds interconnected to define a relationship. Based on your organization's need, you can define a blueprint to:

Start with an application node, such as Namespace and the rest of the service containing one or more applications and infrastructure nodes to create an application to infrastructure map.
Start with an infrastructure node, such as Host and the rest of the service containing one or more applications and infrastructure nodes to create an infrastructure to application map.

Can I use the same blueprint multiple times?

- The same blueprint cannot be used more than once in a service model.

- You can use the same blueprint in different service models.

- You can use a combination of blueprints in same and different service models.

Example

Becky is a service designer at APEX Global. Betty is an operator who has to monitor and manage various business services such as datacenter operations at APEX Global.

Becky gets requests to create new services to manage the operations of her organization. While creating the service models to map these services, Becky realized that there are a few common processes that are part of each of these service models. For example, Kubernetes cluster service and virtual applications management service that are essential common basic services part of many other services, such as Kubernetes deployment, network availability monitoring, virtual datacenter operations, and so on.

In this example, the common basic services such as Kubernetes deployment, network availability monitoring, virtual datacenter operations can be defined as service blueprints.

CIs (Nodes) and CI Kind (Node kind)

A node is an object to represent an entity in the environment discovered by the BMC Discovery datastore. Nodes can be connected to other nodes using relationships. Nodes have a kind, such as 'Host', and a number of named attributes. In BMC Helix AIOps, a node is a CI or component and a node can have a single or multiple kinds.
A node kind is the type of a node, such as a Host or Software Instance. The default set of nodes and their associated attributes and relationships are defined in the BMC Discovery taxonomy. Most node kinds have a key that uniquely identifies the entity in the environment. In BMC Helix AIOps, a node kind is known as CI Kind.