A service model is a representation of a service (business or IT) and the relationship of the infrastructure components, that is, configuration items (CIs) required to provide and support that service.
A CI is any component that must be managed in order to deliver an IT service. Information about each CI is recorded in a configuration record within BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and is maintained throughout its lifecycle by Configuration Management. CIs are under the control of Change Management. CIs typically include hardware, software, buildings, people, and formal documentation, such as process documentation and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A CI must be uniquely identifiable, have some characteristic that can change, be manageable, have certain attributes that are associated with it, and be recorded in BMC Atrium CMDB.
Note
Information about a CI can be stored in BMC ProactiveNet even without the presence of BMC Atrium CMDB. However, this information will be limited to performance and event management. BMC Atrium CMDB is required from an asset management or configuration management perspective.
Service models can be created by using the following BMC products:
- BMC Atrium Explorer
- BMC Impact Model Designer
- BMC ProactiveNet Administration Console
Service modeling terms and concepts
This topic describes some commonly used terms and concepts in service modeling.
Providers and consumers
A service model relationship is a link between a component that provides a service and the components that consume that service. In this relationship, the provider status naturally impacts the consumer status. In the following graphic, Component B is a provider in one relationship and a consumer in another.
Cells and aliases
A service model component can be assigned to only one cell at a time. If you want, for example, to assign a component to a production cell and, at the same time, use it in a test cell for impact experiments, a mechanism is needed to make this possible.
The parameters, HomeCell and CellAliases, and the attributes HomeCell and HomeCellAlias are used by BMC ProactiveNet Publishing Server to determine the cells to which a CI is sent, depending on which have values.
CellAliases and HomeCell are parameters of the publishing environment, whereas HomeCell and HomeCellAlias are attributes of the CI.
The environment’s parameter home cell defines the one cell to which all service model data and management data is sent.
The component’s attribute home cell alias defines another name for home cell looked up from a table so that the data with a specific home cell alias can be sent to different cells for different publishing environments.
Cell alias defines another name for a cell so that data can be sent to more than one cell. A cell can have multiple cell aliases. The mapping of cell name to cell alias is one to many per environment. In other words, for each environment and for each cell alias, there can be only one cell name, but many cell aliases can be mapped to the same cell name.
A cell name can only be used in one AtriumCMDB Publish environment; however, it can be re-used in many Direct Publish environments, even if it is also used in Atrium CMDB environment.
Cell-alias to cell-name values must already be defined when publishing is initiated.
For information about building a service model, see Building a service model.
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