Business services, applications, and service pools
The Business-Services-view is a feature that provides a consolidated summary of all business services in your infrastructure. You can drill down into specific business services and view the associated applications and service pools details, and analyze the capacity at the service pool level.
Overview of business services and applications
Services represent the various functionalities that organizations provide to customers. Customers consume these services to achieve various goals. The IT resources in organizations such as compute, memory, storage, and network work together to support the services provided to customers. For example, emails, messaging, and web hosting.
A business service is any value-added service that is delivered to customers. For example, professional services that are offered by lawyers and financial planners. Sometimes, the business service consists entirely of an IT service. For example, an eCommerce website for delivering goods to customers. In IT organizations, business services are supported by different components, such as servers, applications, and databases.
An application performs a specific business function within a business service. It contains multiple technology tiers, such as web, app, and database.
You can define the associations of business services and the underlying IT infrastructure to build the business service models. These models show the mapping that represents the IT resources and the dependent business services. When these models are aligned with the data that the BMC Helix Capacity Optimization collects, assessing the health of business services from the capacity perspective becomes easy.
Overview of service pools
A service pool is a group of resources that form an infrastructure or technology layer (tier) within an application or a business service. For example, all the virtual machines that are used for the database functions. The service pool resources contribute to the same part of the workload and hence they are sized together. This aggregated sizing for service pools helps you to more precisely plan and manage your capacity needs.
Service pools consume the services that providers provide. For instance, virtual machines consume the services that are provided by hosts. In this case, a host is a provider and a virtual machine is a consumer.
Role of service pools in the capacity analysis
When you analyze the capacity at the service pool level, you can size your infrastructure more accurately and correctly. The image shows the example of the Online Shopping Portal business service and hierarchy of business service, applications, and service pools.
If you decide to make the capacity-related changes at the Online Shopping Portal level, such as adding 5 servers to meet the future demand, they might not be accurate. For instance, your database might be correctly sized. But, you need to increase the servers for the web. Service pools help you identify the area where the additional resources are required based on the usage or risk indicators for these service pools.
Example hierarchy of business service, applications, and service pools for the Online Shopping Portal business service
Setting up and using the Business Services view
Use the Business Services view to analyze the business services and drill down into service pools to perform the problem investigation. After you install the view and import business services and applications data, you can access this view from the Helix Capacity Optimization Dashboard to create service pools and start analyzing the data.
Workflow for setting up and using the Business Services view
The following video (5:03) provides an introduction to the Business Service View.
