Viewing CI and service relationships in the Service Context

Service Context provides information for business service, application, and computer system CIs. See  Creating or modifying People data  for instructions about how to add people to permission groups. You can also see summary information about CIs that are related to the business service, but you must have view permissions for each related CI to see details about those CIs. If you cannot use the Service Context feature, ask your system administrator to ensure that you have the correct permissions.

Service Context displays information about the CI related to the record you are currently viewing. The types of information shown can include new work orders, recently completed changes, recent open incidents, related outage records, and so on. In addition, you can see CIs that are related to the business service, which helps you to understand the relationship that the business service has with its environment. 

The time threshold that determines how recently the recent changes, recent incidents, or new work orders were made or submitted, as well as the criteria used to determine other information types is configurable. Contact your system administrator for information about how the content of the information types is determined.

Understanding the CIs relationship with the business service helps you to prioritize your incident investigations and align your decisions with your service level agreements and the overall goals of the business.

Service Context information is displayed in the Service Context Summary window, which you can open from a variety of locations. The details that you see from, for example, the incident request form, are the same details that are shown in the other applications of BMC Helix ITSM, which ensures that everyone in your organization is working with the same information.

You can view the Service Context Summary window from one of the following locations:

• Application consoles
• Forms

Before you begin

• To use Service Context, the BMC applications and BMC Helix CMDB must be configured to support it. For information about the configuration procedures, see Enabling and configuring Service Context for BMC Helix ITSM applications.
• To use the Service Context Summary window, you must belong to at least one of the following permission groups:
  • Asset User (when working from BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management)
  • Work Order User (when working from BMC Service Request Management)
  • Incident User or Problem User (when working from BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk)
  • Infrastructure Change User or Release User (when working from BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management)

To open the Service Context Summary

• BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk, BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management, and BMC Service Request Management (for Work Order records) — With the record open, click the Service Context icon beside the Service field. The Service Context Summary window opens for the selected record.
  
  
• BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management — With the record open, from the Quick Links area of the navigation pane, click Service Context. The Service Context Summary window opens for the selected record.

To interpret the Service Context information

The information panel at the top of the Service Context Summary window identifies the service name. The other information that appears in the information panel is configurable by your system administrator and comes from the CI form.

Below the information panel is a list of the key attributes. Next to each attribute is a counter that shows the number of active records of that type that are related to the selected service. If you click the counter, another Service Context Summary window opens with a table of detailed information about the records.

For example, if one of the configured attributes is "Recent Incidents" and the counter shows 3, there are 3 incidents currently related to the selected service. If you click the counter, a Service Context Summary window opens with a table that shows summary information about each of the incidents.

The information that appears in the Service Context Summary window is configurable. Ask your system administrator for detailed information about how Service Context is configured in your environment.